#les posts de Michel

[unionizedwizard]

I'll be honest here i didn't even think of fourchenault, i was too blinded by the impossibly cursed name to begin with. but i like it.

oh my god i just learned the french word for forklift

un car à fourche

[cieloclercs]

what would you say (if i told you i love you)? — charles leclerc

PART: 3? (read part 2 here)

summary. in which childhood best friends blur the lines between what they’ve always known, and something more

warnings. swearing, online hate, we’re getting to the angst now 🫣 arguments, charles is an idiot, arthur and joris being sick of his shit (but what else is new)

pairings. charles leclerc x arsty!reader

face claim. tara michelle

author’s note. again, i have no idea how much modern art sells for at auctions so don’t come at me if this seems unrealistic 🙏☹️ i also feel the need to clarify that y/n has 2 instagram accounts, one personal and one for art stuff ☺️

liked by joris_trouche and 51,196 others

y/nsart auction update! 🎨

tide - sold for €12,460 erode - sold for €9,500 wave - sold for €20,890 glint - sold for €6,300

this is nothing short of a dream come true for me. the support i’ve seen both on social media and at the auction (once again, thank you to everyone who stopped by!) has been beyond anything i ever could have hoped for 🩵

if you’d told me when i was a little girl that one day people would pay for art i’ve created, i wouldn’t have believed you. i’m so so grateful to have been given this opportunity to do something that i love and to share it with the world 💗 i can’t wait to see what the future holds!

view all comments…

username congratulations y/n! 💕💕

*y/nsart liked this comment

leclerc_pascale C'est tout à fait mérité. N'arrêtez jamais de peindre, ma fille, vous avez un don! / completely deserved. never stop painting, my girl, you have a gift!

y/nsart merci beaucoup 🥹 je promets de ne pas le faire x / i promise i won’t

arthur_leclerc congratulations petite sœur! / little sister

y/nsart merci arth ☺️

y/nsart also, ‘petite’? i’m literally older than you?

arthur_leclerc but you’re smaller 🙃

charles_leclerc toujours fière de toi, ma chérie ❤️ / forever proud of you, sweetheart

y/nsart 😐

charles_leclerc you’re still mad at me? ☹️

y/nsart if you wanted one of my paintings you could have just asked rather than wasting over €20,000. i would have let you have it for free

charles_leclerc i didn’t waste anything, y/n

username uh oh mom and dad are fighting 😳

username ironic how her highest selling painting was literally bought by her best friend 😭

username i guarantee you it would NOT have sold for that much if charles hadn’t been bidding

username i don’t want to be the one to say it but lately it kind of feels like y/n’s been using her friendship with charles as a way to promote her art…

username as much as i love y/n icl i think you might be right 🥲

username 🤢🤢🤢

username stop using charles’ fame to try and make yourself relevant! you’ll never be good enough for him babes 🥰

username the switch up on these comments from ‘fans’ is actually so embarrassing

username i know! it’s like as soon as y/n starts becoming successful everyone suddenly decides it’s not because of her own hard work but because of charles 🙄

username lmao how has she managed to make tens of thousands for that shit she calls art? i’m sensing a clout chaser 😂

username this REEKS of jealousy

username these comments make me sick. y/n has proved time and time again how talented and hard working she is. just because charles doesn’t know you exist doesn’t mean you get to hate on another girl who he ACTUALLY cares about. grow up.

*charles_leclerc and y/nsart liked this comment

username i feel so bad for y/n. no offence to charles but if he’d let the auction play out normally without bidding (although he does have a right to do so if he wants!) then she wouldn’t be getting all this hate right now 😔

comments on this post have been limited.

liked by pierregasly and 1,567,836 others

charles_leclerc back to work 🇳🇱

view all comments…

username no y/n like? ☹️

username is y/n with you?

username guys check kym illman’s instagram! he said charles turned up to the paddock alone…

username i mean, y/n could be arriving later right?

username if y/n isn’t there it’ll be the first race she’s missed since singapore last year 😳

username y/n has a life besides charles! just because she’s not at one race doesn’t mean they’ve fallen out or anything ☺️

username but think about it…neither charles nor y/n have posted anything to do with each other since the auction a week ago normally they can barely go a day without posting each other 🥴

username can everyone just stop talking about y/n 🙄 all she ever did was distract him anyway

username forza charles! ❤️

username he’s not even smiling :((

username because he knows ferrari are shit, it’s probably nothing to do with y/n

username i didn’t even mention her? 😭

joris_trouche i think you’re missing someone mate

username JORIS??

username HE KNOWS SOMETHING!!

username JORIS PLEASE TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW

username i hate to be the bearer of bad news but y/n just posted. she’s not at the grand prix 🥲

yourusername

viewed by charles_leclerc and 9,637 others

replies:

arthur_leclerc oh shit arthur_leclerc what did he do joris_trouche just say the word and i’ll smack him for you 😁 ↳ yourusername please don’t do that 😭 yourfriend you don’t need him, mon amour ❤️ ↳ yourusername ☺️

you:

did i do something wrong?

we haven’t spoken in a week

charlie 🤍:

no, y/n

you:

you won’t answer my calls

charlie 🤍:

i’ve been thinking about what you said

i don’t want you to have to deal with hate because of me

you:

so you think ignoring me is the answer?

charlie 🤍:

i’m not ignoring you, y/n, i’m trying to protect you

you:

what the fuck?

charles, i don’t care what people say about you

charlie 🤍:

but i do

isn’t it for the best? if we aren’t seen together for a while, you won’t get any of the hate

you:

you really don’t get it do you

if you think i want you to cut me off to ‘protect me’ then maybe you don’t know me as well as i thought you did

charlie 🤍:

don’t say that

i just want everyone to see you the way i do

you:

and i already told you, i don’t care what they think of me

i only care what you think

charlie 🤍:

why?

you:

i’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet

charlie 🤍:

figured what out? [ seen at 4:11PM ]

y/n?

you:

i think it’s best if we don’t see each other for a while

bye charles

charlie 🤍:

what?! [ seen at 4:13PM ]

y/n come back [ delivered at 4:14PM ]

just tell me what you mean [ delivered at 4:20PM ]

please y/n [ delivered at 4:47PM ]

liked by yourfriend and 1,637,937 others

scuderiaferrari A DNF in Zandvoort for Charles. Now time to refocus ready for Monza 🔜

view all comments…

username what the actual fuck was going on with him today?

username i don’t know. i’ve never seen him so distracted 😕

username honestly a rookie mistake. if he’s going to be pulling shit like this then he doesn’t deserve his seat 🤷

username it’s just one mistake?? calm down 😭

username why do i feel like this has something to do with y/n…

username oh my god will you all shut up about y/n 🙄 they’re not even dating !!

username and? they’ve been best friends since they were 5 years old. if my childhood friendship broke down i’d be pretty fucking upset about it too

username we don’t actually know that they’ve fallen out tho…neither of them have said anything

username but isn’t it obvious? y/n not at the race, charles being distracted and sulky around the paddock? they’ve definitely argued about something

username charles i can’t keep defending you when you do this 💔💔💔

username how this guy has managed to keep his seat with all these mistakes i have no idea 😒

username hopefully y/n will be in monza to bring him some good luck🤞

➜ part 4

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

"She ain't going!" 😭😂👍🏿🇺🇸♥️

“Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.

Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents.

“She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.

“Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet,” the source added.

Melania Trump Speaks Out About Jill Biden — ‘She Referred to My Husband as Evil and a Liar’

by Cassandra MacDonald Nov. 13, 2024

“Mrs. Trump will not be attending today’s meeting at the White House. Her husband’s return to the Oval Office to commence the transition process is encouraging, and she wishes him great success,” Melania Trump’s team said in a statement about the invite.

Unnamed sources allegedly close to the former and future First Lady told the New York Post that her reason for skipping tea was the raid on Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Mrs. Trump met with Michelle Obama after the 2016 election but did not have tea with Jill Biden in 2020.

The interview went viral after news broke that she would not meet the current First Lady during her husband’s trip to the White House.

Mrs.Trump revealed that Jill Biden called her after the assassination attempt on Donald J. Trump in October but wonders if her “concern was genuine,” given the inflammatory way she had been speaking of him on the campaign trail.

“I do question, however, whether Jill’s concern was genuine, as a few days prior she referred to my husband as ‘evil’ and a ‘liar,’” she told French outlet Paris Match.

The former model continued, “It was obvious that the onslaught of rhetoric from Democrat leaders and the mainstream media was so deeply embedded in our nation’s consciousness it prompted an attempt to assassinate Donald.”

Mrs. Trump said that after the assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally, she was relieved “my husband was safe,” but was upset about the political environment that prompted it.

“They want Donald out. They won’t stop. Has the concept of ‘respect’ become antiquated?” she asked. “The Democrat political engine peddles harsh words, vile names, and labels our nation’s 45th president ‘a threat to democracy.’”

“People today are so desensitized they actually joke about killing a former US president,” Mrs. Trump continued. “It is undeniable that this type of speech created a toxic political environment.”

[revolutionarywig]

I saw my friend took pictures of this play apparently now ongoing in Paris and I had to search it up

LE DÎNER DE- WHAT???

So Robespierre is not a character in the play, but rather there are these characters who must dress up as a figure from the French Revolution...

Also there's Camille (middle) and presumably Marie Antoinette on the right

Summary:

Dans une petite ville de province, un groupe d’amis de la bonne société se donne rendez-vous pour un « dîner de têtes ». Chacun doit se faire la tête d’un grand personnage de la Révolution française. André Bitos, fils du peuple devenu magistrat incorruptible et vertueux, est l’invité d’honneur : il jouera Robespierre. Mais il semble que l’objectif de cette soirée ne soit pas uniquement de refaire l’histoire de France... Cette bande de notables en smoking-perruque va se lancer dans un jeu de massacre aussi cruel que jubilatoire. Drôle, grinçant et terriblement actuel, ce chef d’œuvre d’intelligence renvoie dos à dos haine de l’Autre et tyrannie de la Vertu.

"In a small provincial town, a group of friends from high society meet for a dinner of heads. Each must reimagine themselves as a great figure from the French Revolution. André Bitos, son of the people who became an incorruptible and virtuous magistrate, is the guest of honour: he will play Robespierre. But it seems that the goal of tonight was not to only reenact the history of France...This band of notables in their tuxedo-wigs are heading into a game of massacre as cruel as it is exhilarating. Funny, grating, and terribly current, this intelligent masterpiece brings back to back the hatred of the Other and tyranny of Virtue."

Okay HMMMM from the wording of that it sounds like it's not gonna be the most redeeming or best depiction of Robespierre or the Revolution in general. From the website it seems to be connecting the "Terror" with post-WWII France "purge"? (l'épuration, from the wording on the website) .....I am not knowledgeable in WWII France but I am a bit on the fence for that.....

BUT heyyyyy look at that Camille

The height BRUH

[empirearchives]

Gaudin’s description of Napoleon

Martin-Michel Gaudin was Napoleon’s Minister of Finance. He entered the world of finance at the age of 17 and achieved the highest rank a non-aristocrat could achieve in finance administration pre-Revolution (“first clerk”). During the Revolution, he was the Commissioner of the National Treasury. He left government in 1795 and resisted further governmental recruiting attempts until Napoleon (who he had never met) approached him in 1799. Gaudin describes their first meeting in his memoir:

I found a personage who was known to me only by the high reputation he had already acquired; of low stature, dressed in a gray frock coat, extremely thin, yellow complexion, eagle-eyed, with lively movements [...] he came to me with the most gracious air.

“You have,” he said, “worked in finance for a long time?”

“Twenty years, General!”

“We need your help badly, and I’m counting on it. Come on, take your oath, we’re in a hurry.”

This formality completed, he added: “The last minister of the Directory will be informed of your appointment. Meet in two hours at the ministry to take possession of it, and provide a report on our situation as soon as you can, as well as on the first measures to be taken to restore the service which is lacking everywhere. Come see me this evening at my house on rue de la Victoire (that’s what rue Chantereine was then called), we will discuss our business more fully.”

I withdrew to carry out the orders I had just received.

(Source: Gaudin, Mémoires, souvenirs, opinions et écrits du duc de Gaète, pp. 45-46)

Historian Pierre Branda on their partnership:

“Intuition, good advice or genius? Bonaparte’s choice was judicious, because Gaudin would successfully occupy this ministerial post for the entire duration of the Consulate and the Empire, including the Hundred Days. With such longevity, he was undoubtedly one of Napoleon’s most appreciated ministers. It is true that the two men were often in perfect agreement.”

(Source: Le prix de la gloire: Napoléon et l’argent, pp. 197)

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

I decided to try this but for the girlies instead.

Are you sure want to click on ”keep reading”?

For Pauline Léon marrying Claire Lacombe’s host, see Liberty: the lives of six women in Revolutionary France (2006) by Lucy Moore, page 230

For Pauline Léon throwing a bust of Lafayette through Fréron’s window and being friends with Constance Evrard, see Pauline Léon, une républicaine révolutionnaire (2006) by Claude Guillon.

For Françoise Duplay’s sister visiting Catherine Théot, see Points de vue sur l’affaire Catherine Théot (1969) by Michel Eude, page 627.

For Anne Félicité Colombe publishing the papers of Marat and Fréron, see The women of Paris and their French Revolution (1998) by Dominique Godineau, page 382-383.

For the relationship between Simonne Evrard and Albertine Marat, see this post.

For Albertine Marat dissing Charlotte Robespierre, see F.V Raspail chez Albertine Marat (1911) by Albert Mathiez, page 663.

For Lucile Desmoulins predicting Marie-Antoinette would mount the scaffold, see the former’s diary from 1789.

For Lucile being friends with madame Boyer, Brune, Dubois-Crancé, Robert and Danton, calling madame Ricord’s husband ”brusque, coarse, truly mad, giddy, insane,” visiting ”an old madwoman” with madame Duplay’s son and being hit on by Danton as well as Louise Robert saying she would stab Danton, see Lucile’s diary 1792-1793.

For the relationship between Lucile Desmoulins and Marie Hébert, see this post.

For the relationship between Lucile Desmoulins and Thérèse Jeanne Fréron de la Poype, and the one between Annette Duplessis and Marguerite Philippeaux, see letters cited in Camille Desmoulins and his wife: passages from the history of the dantonists (1876) page 463-464 and 464-469.

For Adèle Duplessis having been engaged to Robespierre, see this letter from Annette Duplessis to Robespierre, seemingly written April 13 1794.

For Claire Panis helping look after Horace Desmoulins, see Panis précepteur d’Horace Desmoulins (1912) by Charles Valley.

For Élisabeth Lebas being slandered by Guffroy, molested by Danton, treated like a daughter by Claire Panis, accusing Ricord of seducing her sister-in-law and being helped out in prison by Éléonore, see Le conventionnel Le Bas : d'après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve, page 108, 125-126, 139 and 140-142.

For Élisabeth Lebas being given an obscene book by Desmoulins, see this post.

For Charlotte Robespierre dissing Joséphine, Éléonore Duplay, madame Genlis, Roland and Ricord, see Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834), page  76-77,  90-91, 96-97, 109-116 and 128-129.

For Charlotte Robespierre arriving two hours early to Rosalie Jullien’s dinner, see Journal d’une Bourgeoise pendant la Révolution 1791–1793, page 345.

For Charlotte Robespierre physically restraining Couthon, see this post.

For Charlotte Robespierre and Françoise Duplay’s relationship, see Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834) page 85-92 and Le conventional Le Bas: d’après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve (1902) page 104-105

For the relationship between Charlotte Robespierre and Victoire and Élisabeth Lebas, see this post.

For Charlotte Robespierre visiting madame Guffroy, moving in with madame Laporte and Victoire Duplay being arrested by one of Charlotte’s friends, see Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961)

For Louise de Kéralio calling Etta Palm a spy, see Appel aux Françoises sur la régénération des mœurs et nécessité de l’influence des femmes dans un gouvernement libre (1791) by the latter.

For the relationship between Manon Roland and Louise de Kéralio Robert, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 198-207 

For the relationship between Madame Pétion and Manon Roland, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 158 and 244-245 as well as Lettres de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 510.

For the relationship between Madame Roland and Madame Buzot, see Mémoires de Madame Roland (1793), volume 1, page 372, volume 2, page 167 as well as this letter from Manon to her husband dated September 9 1791. For the affair between Manon and Buzot, see this post.

For Manon Roland praising Condorcet, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 14-15.

For the relationship between Manon Roland and Félicité Brissot, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 1, page 360.

For the relationship between Helen Maria Williams and Manon Roland, see Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre (1795), written by the former.

For the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and Helena Maria Williams, see Collected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (1979), page 226.

For Constance Charpentier painting a portrait of Louise Sébastienne Danton, see Constance Charpentier: Peintre (1767-1849), page 74.

For Olympe de Gouges writing a play with fictional versions of the Fernig sisters, see L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles ou les Vivandiers (1793) page 94-97 and 105-110.

For Olympe de Gouges calling Charlotte Corday ”a monster who has shown an unusual courage,” see a letter from the former dated July 20 1793, cited on page 204 of Marie-Olympe de Gouges: une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (2003) by Oliver Blanc.

For Olympe de Gouges adressing her declaration to Marie-Antoinette, see Les droits de la femme: à la reine (1791) written by the former.

For Germaine de Staël defending Marie-Antoinette, see Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine par une femme (1793) by the former.

For the friendship between Madame Royale and Pauline Tourzel, see Souvernirs de quarante ans: 1789-1830: récit d’une dame de Madame la Dauphine (1861) by the latter.

For Félicité Brissot possibly translating Mary Wollstonecraft, see Who translated into French and annotated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman? (2022) by Isabelle Bour.

For Félicité Brissot working as a maid for Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis: sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la révolution française, volume 4, page 106.

For Reine Audu, Claire Lacombe and Théroigne de Méricourt being given civic crowns together, see Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, September 3, 1792.

For Reine Audu taking part in the women’s march on Versailles, see Reine Audu: les légendes des journées d’octobre (1917) by Marc de Villiers.

For Marie-Antoinette calling Lamballe ”my dear heart,” see Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette, page 197, 209 and 252.

For Marie-Antoinette disliking Madame du Barry, see https://plume-dhistoire.fr/marie-antoinette-contre-la-du-barry/

For Marie-Antoinette disliking Anne de Noailles, see Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette, page 30.

For Louise-Élisabeth Tourzel and Lamballe being friends, see Memoirs of the Duchess de Tourzel: Governess to the Children of France during the years 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793 and 1795 volume 2, page 257-258

For Félicité de Genlis being the mistress of Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon’s husband, see La duchesse d’Orléans et Madame de Genlis (1913).

For Pétion escorting Madame Genlis out of France, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis…, volume 4, page 99.

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Louise de Kéralio Robert, see Mémoires de Madame de Genlis: en un volume, page 352-354

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Germaine de Staël, see Mémoires inédits de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 2, page 316-317

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Théophile Fernig, see Mémoires inédits de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 4, page 300-304

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Félicité Brissot, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 4, page 106-110, as well as this letter dated June 1783 from Félicité Brissot to Félicité Genlis.

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Théresa Cabarrus, see Mémoires de Madame de Genlis: en un volume (1857) page 391.

For Félicité de Genlis inviting Lucile to dinner, see this letter from Sillery to Desmoulins dated March 3 1791.

For Marinette Bouquey hiding the husbands of madame Buzot, Pétion and Guadet, see Romances of the French Revolution (1909) by G. Lenotre, volume 2, page 304-323

Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

[kiddressources]

Hello les petits chats ✨

Comme j'ai changé de thème, je change aussi de pinned post mais je ne veux pas que vous pensiez que j'ai oublié les suggestions laissées sur le dernier!

Sous le divider ci-dessous seront les noms que j'ai noté pour les faire par la suite, quand le temps et l'inspi me le permettront. Vous pouvez continuer à poster des suggestions sur ce post uniquement, pour que j'y vois plus clair! (les suggestions faites ailleurs ne seront pas prises en compte). Si vous en avez une sous la main, n'hésitez pas à drop une petite galerie également. 💖

Bonne journée à vous ✨

Suggestions: Clément Penhoat (Hatik), Colman Domingo, Emily Blunt, Glen Powell, Havana Rose Liu, Jess Glynne, Keke Palmer, Isabelle Mathers, Lizeth Selene, Michelle Yeoh, Miriam Leone, Nicholas Galitzine, Park Eun-bin, Rachel Brosnahan, Rachel Weisz, Rami Malek, Taylor Lashae, Vinetria Chubbs

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

PARIS 2024 🇫🇷 Adieu to Summer of Unforgettable Games

Paralympics - Closing Ceremony - Paris, France - September 8, 2024

Closing ceremony: Santa shines with Johnny Hallyday cover at the Stade de France. The Paralympic Games end with a closing ceremony that takes the form of a huge electro party to celebrate the athletes.

Santa opened the final ceremony of the Paris 2024 Games with Johnny Hallyday’s classic "Vivre pour le Meilleur".

Breaking takes the stage!

This modern dance with a strong power of inclusion is featured in the closing ceremony. A celebration of diversity to the beats of Cut Killer 🎉 @Thomajolly, Directeur artistique des cérémonies de Paris 2024

International Paralympic Committee President Andrew Parsons Closing Ceremony speech

Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024, addresses the crowd.

The evening kicks off perfectly with Jean Michel Jarre igniting the Stade de France.

Picture by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

The Paralympic Flame arrived at the Stade de France, the lantern as it passed from one Paralympic athlete to another until arriving in the hands of three-time Paris 2024 champion in Para-cycling road Mathieu Bosredon and France’s first Paralympic boccia champion Aurelie Aubert.

Together they blew out the flame and, as they did, the flame in the hot-air balloon cauldron suspended in the air over the Tuileries Garden

“Let's keep doing, let's keep believing and above all... let's keep daring."

The Paralympic Flame is extinguished, and the Paris 2024 Games have come to an end. (darn dust in the eye) 📸 Getty / Graham Denholm

The job is done!

Merci beaucoup! Paris 🇫🇷

Now it's your turn @LA28 🇺🇸 and make us dream in four years!

#Paralympics #Paris2024 #closingceremony #@LA28 #Paris

Posted 8th September 2024

[aurevoirmonty]

La presse cravache déjà pour recaser un pion du système à Matignon

Bayrou, Retailleau, Cazeneuve, Baroin: les noms s’empilent (https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/bernard-cazeneuve-francois-bayrou-sebastien-lecornu-ces-noms-qui-circulent-pour-remplacer-michel-barnier-a-matignon_VN-202412050117.html) dans des médias qui relaient avec zèle les petits mots que lui glisse à l’oreille la macronie.

La gestion du pays n’est plus la priorité, la crise institutionnelle n’intéresse personne.

Pour le cloaque politico-médiatique qui regarde sans voir la démocratie crever, le seul intérêt est de savoir qui va, comme dans une mauvaise émission de télé-crochet, décrocher le Graal.

Pour en faire quoi? Continuer l’entreprise de démolition du pays.

Si prompte à appeler au changement de régime ailleurs dans le monde, ici la presse ne va pas faire pression pour que Macron démissionne (https://t.me/kompromatmedia_2/1745?single), seule solution pourtant à une situation devenue inextricable.

Elle préfère vendre un Lecornu, ministre des Armées, qui veut absolument (https://t.me/kompromatmedia_2/1597) faire la guerre à la Russie:

«Une personnalité politique consensuelle qui sait dialoguer et faire avancer ses intérêts politiques.»

Servir ses intérêts au lieu de servir la grandeur la France, une qualité idoine pour le poste.

[transmutationisms]

Your understanding of succession is very nuanced and I find reading your takes very enriching! All I wish is to have your literary analysis skills. If you could share where you started in understanding topics like psychoanalysis, bodily fluids as a symbol, using political lens to understand lit, or anything like that, that would be much appreciated! Sorry if this has been asked before, if you could direct me to that post I’d appreciate that

hi! i wouldn't consider myself any kind of expert in lit crit and i think it's something i continue to get better at just by doing more of it. so i'm not sure how helpful i can be here lol. but, some texts that have probably formed theoretical foundations for my reading of succession are:

history of shit, by dominique laporte, tr. rodolphe el-khoury

water and dreams: an essay on the imagination of matter, by gaston bachelard, tr. edith r. farrell

psychoanalysis of fire, by gaston bachelard, tr. alan c. m. ross

marx's 1844 manuscripts

anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, by gilles deleuze & félix guattari, tr. robert hurley, mark seem, & helen r. lane

body fascism: salvation in the technology of physical fitness, by brian pronger

'malthus and the evolutionists', by robert m. young

the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978–79, by michel foucault, tr. graham burchell

discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, by michel foucault, tr. alan sheridan

faces of degeneration: a european disorder, 1848–1918, by daniel pick

capitalist realism, by mark fisher

three essays on the theory of sexuality, by sigmund freud, tr. james strachey

society of the spectacle, by guy debord, tr. donald nicholson-smith

le paris moderne: histoire des politiques d'hygiène, 1855–1898, by fabienne chevallier

we have never been modern, by bruno latour, tr. catherine porter

the arcades project, by walter benjamin, tr. howard eiland & kevin mclaughlin

french modern: norms and forms of the social environment, by paul rabinow

[sensitiveuser]

Posterity of Louise Michel, from 1905 to the present day

(1) Global history

"The history of the Commune is rich in beautiful and noble figures. The one who, in this remarkable gallery, has remained the most popular is that of our dear Louise Michel. Is it because, at the very heart of this deeply moving drama, she took part in all the scenes which together constitute a true tragedy? Is it because she always knew how to remain in the militant ranks with the most obscure and fought with the most heroic? Is it because, devoured by an inner flame of exceptional incandescence, she had the gift of warming with her own ardour all those around her? Is it because, as a woman, she rivalled in intrepidity with the most valiant? Is it because, until the supreme hour of defeat, she did not allow herself to be overcome by discouragement for a moment? Is it because, before her judges, she stood in solidarity with the federates whom a savage repression had condemned to the death penalty, magnificently demanded a responsibility equal to theirs and demanded for herself, alongside them, the execution post? Is it, finally, because more and better than anyone else she embodied the spirit of the Commune and the demands of the suburbs and their working population. It would be difficult to say and I imagine that the halo that enveloped this admirable head in a resplendent circle is made of all that. " (Sébastien Faure, Le Libertaire, May 24, 1935)

"I do not want to defend myself, I do not want to be defended; I belong entirely to the social revolution and I declare that I accept responsibility for all my actions; I accept it without restriction. You accuse me of having participated in the execution of the generals; To that I will answer: they wanted to shoot the people, I would not have hesitated to shoot those who gave similar orders. As for the fire in Paris, yes, I participated in it, I wanted to oppose a barrier of flames to the invaders of Versailles; I have no accomplices, I acted on my own initiative. The rapporteur Dailly demands the death penalty. Louise Michel: - What I demand from you who affirm a council of war, who present yourselves as my judges, but who do not hide yourselves like the commission of pardons, is the field of Satory where our brothers have already fallen; I must be cut off from society, you were told to do so. Well! The Commissioner of the Republic is right. Since it seems that any heart that beats for freedom is only entitled to a little lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I will never stop crying for vengeance, and I will ask for vengeance from my brothers, the assassins of the pardon commission. The President. - I cannot let you speak. Louise Michel. - I have finished! If you are not cowards, kill me. They did not have the courage to kill her all at once. She was condemned to deportation in a fortified enclosure. Louise Michel was not unique in this genre. Many others, among whom we must mention Madame Lemel, Augustine Chiffon, showed the people of Versailles what terrible women Parisians are, even in chains." (Louise Michel, La Commune, 1898). In this excerpt, Louise Michel takes up the scene of her trial (December 16, 1871) transcribed by Lissagaray (Histoire de la Commune, 1871). She stands up to the 6th Council of War, which finally condemns her to deportation to the penal colony of Kanaky (I prefer to say "Kanaky" rather than New Caledonia, for obvious reasons :)).

The construction of Louise Michel as a symbolic figure of the Commune took shape from her trial. She is the incarnation of these "petroleuses", who arouse so much passion and hatred for the memory of Versailles; Indeed, the "petroleuse" is one of the strongest images of the Commune, and, according to Eric Fournier, "perhaps the most resistant of its black legend". In the memory of Versailles, the figure of the "petroleuse" is not assimilated to the militant or the barricader, the latter being very real figures.

In 1880, Louise Michel returned to Paris, acclaimed by 20,000 people... As a militant who was now an anarchist, determined and tireless, and then she gave a series of conferences. In 1883, she took part in the demonstration of the "workers without work" at the Invalides, and brandished the famous black flag for the first time; she stated in her Memoirs "No more red flag wet with the blood of our soldiers. I will fly the black flag, mourning our dead and our illusions".

This is how pneumonia took her, in January 1905, in Marseille. 120,000 people attended his funeral on January 9, 1905, in Levallois-Perret. Thousands of red flags were seen. No black flags, because they were banned by these liberticidal and reactionary villainous laws. Of course, the faithful were escorted by a large pack of police officers mobilized by Lépine. After the funeral, a gathering of 1,500 people took place at the Bourse du travail in Levallois-Perret. Speeches were given by Sébastien Faure, Charles Malato, Séverine, Pierre Monatte, Georges Yvetot (CGT unionist, general secretary of the Fédération des Bourses – succeeding Fernand Pelloutier). At that time, the different tendencies of French socialism put aside their ideological differences...

However, until the 1920s, the commemoration of Louise Michel's death did not manage to take hold over time. The annual demonstrations near her grave, from January 1906 to January 1914, brought together only a few dozen people, mainly anarchists. In 1906, Emile Derré, a sculptor close to anarchist circles and Jean Grave's Temps nouveaux, decided to sculpt a bust of Louise Michel. It was not until the early 1920s that this sculpture was placed in Levallois-Perret.

Following the Tours Congress, the memory of the Paris Commune was expressed intensely in the Communist Party. The Communist Party claimed to be the heir to the Commune. The collective political use of the reference to Louise Michel was truly activated. The memory of Louise Michel appeared to be closely linked to the memory of the Paris Commune. The PC made Louise Michel a "tutelary", exemplary figure. Louise Michel’s writings are also transcribed in the newspaper L’Humanité. That said, the communists’ memorial work gradually “autonomizes” the memory of Louise Michel in relation to the memory of the Commune. From January 1921, the PC inaugurated and ritualized the commemorations of her death, each January. Overall, 3,000 people participated each year. However, the commemorations of 1923, 1927 and 1937 brought together around 10,000 faithful, and around 20,000 in January 1925, and up to 50,000 in 1928.

The interest devoted by the PC to Louise Michel can be explained by the presence of representatives of the left wing: Pierre Monatte, Madeleine Pelletier, Boris Souvarine (until their exclusion in 1924), Fernand Desprès, Ernest Girault. The latter was first an individualist anarchist, then he campaigned in the CGT. From 1919 to 1920, he campaigned in the first communist party (councillist) alongside Raymond Péricat. He joined the PC following the Tours Congress. As a result, he was criticized by the magazine Le Libertaire. The PC leadership called on him to provide the link between the anarchist “tradition” and the communist and Bolshevik perspective. In January 1926, he concluded his speech with “Hail to Lenin! Hail to Louise Michel!”. To accompany these militant uses of commemoration, the PC developed a concept that designated Louise Michel as a martyr of the project of a communist society. Fernand Desprès, a libertarian and anarcho-syndicalist activist who joined the PCF, proclaimed in L’Humanité that Louise Michel was “the saint of the people, a human and pathetic saint, whose existence lacked nothing, neither persecution, nor prison, nor exile.”

From an anarchist point of view, it is illegitimate for the Bolsheviks to appropriate the memory of Louise Michel. In 1935, Le Libertaire recalled that “The good Louise was above all an ANARCHIST. And here, we can only regret the attitude of the communists, in particular, trying to monopolize the one who was against all tyrannies, the one whose heart beat for all freedoms, she who always remained foreign to sordid political concerns” (Le Libertaire, January 1935).

From 1940 to 1945, the memory of the Commune occupied an important place in the imagination of the resistance fighters. The memory of the Commune shared by the PCF (new name of the PC) took on a patriotic dimension.

In December 1945, at the request of the CGT and the PCF, the mayor of Levallois-Perret agreed to move the "remains" of the Louise Michel to the roundabout of remembrance. In January 1946, the activists of the Anarchist Federation, who found it inconceivable to associate the Paris Commune with patriotism, contested the "patriotic" speeches of certain PCF activists. Fernand Plache, one of the first biographers of Louise Michel, introduces his work by noting his opposition to the patriotism of the PCF: "Because she was a communard in 70, people wanted to hear that Louise Michel had been a patriot in 1940. The party of politicians is going to procession to the cemetery of Levallois, to the tomb of Louise Michel (...) Stop there! Do not touch the good Louise. The one who died on a lecture tour where she preached the conscripts' strike has nothing in common with you!" (Fernand Plache, La vie ardente et intrépide de Louise Michel, 1946).

The memorial work around Louise Michel, led by anarchists, is based on the contestation of the "recuperation" of Louise Michel, of her appropriation by the PCF, but also by the SFIO, who appropriate the figure by distorting her for political ends, forgetting the true nature of her commitment. Have the social traitors forgotten this quote: "Power is cursed, that's why I'm an anarchist", and the black flag that we owe to her? In 1971, it was written in Le Monde libertaire "Louise Michel would have successively approved the Moscow trials, de-Stalinization, Prague and the assassination of Polish workers by progressive tanks"; a sign of irony relative to a communist party that believes it has the memorial monopoly of the Commune !

Overall, from 1946 until the 1970s, the memory of Louise Michel is not very present. In 1955, the fiftieth anniversary of his death was celebrated only in the libertarian press, including Le Libertaire, which had become the central organ of the Anarchist Federation.

From 1968 and at the beginning of the 1970s, the libertarian communist forces (the Libertarian Communist Movement of Daniel Guérin and Georges Fontenis), Trotskyists, Maoists, gained visibility. On the electoral terrain, the PCF is retreating. In the 1970s, two dynamics reconfigured the memorial constructions around Louise Michel, and participated in the fragmentation and diversification of the appropriations of this figure: the progressive "deconflictualization" of an official memory of the Paris Commune, and the establishment of a "state feminism" (creation of the Ministry of Women's Rights in 1974).

The contestation of the PCF’s monopoly on the memory of the Commune since the 1920s, the action of historians who seek to create a history detached from the Marxist interpretation (, and the action of memorial associations, contribute to developing different memorial registers. Therefore, there are two memorial conceptions of the Paris Commune: a “pacified” vision, quite consensual, of a Paris Commune integrated into the national narrative, and a conflictual use of the Paris Commune as a symbol of the workers’ movement and an example of current struggles.

The 1970s also saw the development of awareness of Louise Michel's status as a woman (which had been set aside by the communists). Edith Thomas insisted on her moral virtues. It was a question of valuing the charismatic and symbolic dimensions of Louise Michel, more than her political and ideological role.

From 1981, with the appointment of Yvette Roudy (PCF) as Minister for Women's Rights, a certain conception of feminism in the sphere of political power was introduced. This conception was based on an individualized history of women, a history valuing their merit and charisma, as "exceptional women". From March 8, 1982, International Women's Day was officially celebrated in France. On that day, stamps bearing the image of Louise Michel, Clara Zetkin, Flora Tristan, Hubertine Auclert, Danielle Casanova and Pauline Kergomard, were exhibited. Consequently, Louise Michel became a historical figure integrated as a "legitimate republican figure". According to Sidonie Verhaeghe, the access of the socialist party to power contributed to extracting the figure of Louise Michel from the political margins in order to be able to integrate her into the national narrative.

The explosion of references to Louise Michel is due to a transformation of the forms of celebration. We observe a taking over of memorial productions by academic historians, amateurs, novelists, artists, without forgetting far-left activists (the real one, not the anti-liberal left described as far-left by the right-wingers ^^). The role of associations must be highlighted: Les Amis de la Commune de Paris (which inherits the Solidarité des procrits of Henri Champy and then the Société fraternelle des anciens combattant.es de la Commune), the Louise Michel Association located in her native Haute-Marne, the Louise Michel International Association. In Marseille, commemorations take place in January. In Vroncourt, they take place in May in memory of Bloody Week. In Dieppe, it is the return of Louise Michel from her deportation, in November, that is celebrated.

At present, the republican integration of the figure of Louise Michel is not a consensus. In 2013, the proposal to have her entered the Pantheon gave rise to different visions of the homage: the defense of institutional recognition for feminist activists of social-democrat tendency (Osez le féminisme), or a categorical refusal of republican honors among anarchist activists who claim a direct lineage with the positions adopted by Louise Michel.

[broadwaydivastournament]

Movie Musical Divas Tournament: Round 1

Catherine Deneuve (1943- ): Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964 - Geneviève Émery) | Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967 - Delphine Garnier)

"There's nothing better than Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy musicals. If you've ever seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg then you know how that love theme stays in your head for good. Otherwise have a look at the video and join the club. I will also say that Catherine still had fantastic musical work in here past the turn of the century, though this form prevents me from being more specific 🤫" -anonymous

Françoise Dorléac (1942-1967): Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967 - Solange Garnier)

"Unfortunately I can't find her other numbers in high quality, but I love her and Gene Kelly in The Young Girls of Rochefort!" - anonymous

This is Round 1 of the Movie Musical Divas tournament. Additional polls in this round may be found by searching #mmround1, or by clicking the link below. Add your propaganda and support by reblogging this post.

ADDITIONAL PROPAGANDA AND MEDIA UNDER CUT: ALL POLLS HERE

Catherine Deneuve:

Photos and video submitted by: anonymous

Françoise Dorléac:

Photos and video submitted by: anonymous

[mask131]

French fantasy review: Les flammes de la nuit

I do wonder why I make these posts – about French novels that I do not think were translated in English, reviewing them in English on an English-speaking website… I do know that some French people are lurking around under a mask of Englishness, but still, most people here are those that I guess will never have access to the novels I review… But oh well, I’ll do what I’ll do, as bizarre as it may sound: and what I’ll do is talk about the French fantasy.

I already translated a long time ago some articles written about the French fantasy literature, but here I will share my personal thoughts and favorites when it comes to this genre of fantasy that is considered “foreign” and “exotic” by the simple virtue of… not being written in English. France is the land of literature, and has already bred, nursed and thoroughly exploited and theorized the two genres that gave birth to the fantasy and yet are so hard to translate in English: the merveilleux of fables and epics, the fantastique of 19th century supernatural tales… Why wouldn’t France have fantasy too? The name of the genre stays English, unfortunately, but it has enough echoes and roots within our own féeries and surnaturel to find a place prepared for it since centuries…

Anyway, enough lyrical: let’s get into the meat of the subject, let’s dig to the bone, and I want to begin with “Les flammes de la nuit” (The flames of the night) by Michel Pagel.

When I picked up this book I was not expecting anything precisely from it, I was just curious. I had only ever heard of Michel Pagel through a huge and dark series of his called “La Comédie Inhumaine” that everybody loved and that was renowned as a dark and violent fantastique, but I never read it. The reason I picked up this book was due to its relationship with fairytales. If you do not know I am REALLY into fairytale stuff, I even have an entire sideblog just to talk about fairytales ( @adarkrainbow ). And this novel was advertised as being a fairytale subversion, so I thought, let’s get into it! [EDIT: I actually also had heard of Michel Pagel through another work of his that now I will definitively read, Le Roi d’Août, a supernatural historical novel that faithfully retells the biography of the king Philippe Auguste… While filling some historical blanks in his life by the intervention and encounter of the supernatural folks hiding within the French landscape.]

Most notably, when I checked briefly online reviews to see if I should get the book, all agreed on a same thing: all said that the book was absolutely great, with wonderful ideas and powerful characters… until the very end which had disappointed everybody (at least at the time the reviews were made, so by the 2000s/early 2010s). As a result I went into this novel saying to myself “Okay, the beginning and middle will be great, the end will be bad, get ready”. And… what a surprise! The ending was not bad at all. A bit confused and rushed but… it was a good ending. Or rather a fitting ending (because it is not a happy or positive one, nor is it a negative one – it is a grandiose, tragic, bittersweet but hopeful ending perfect for the tone of the novel and the project the author set upon himself). If you ask me, all the reviews were wrong – and I had been deceived for the best, since the novel surpassed what I was expecting. Now, I won’t throw the stone, I actually understand why these readers were disappointed with the ending and I’ll explain why (spoiler: it is a question of context and point of view). For now, I’ll simply say that I greatly love this novel which definitively goes into my top French fantasy novels.

In terms of editions and publications, a few indications… This is one of those typical edition thingies that are so peculiar to France. The novel was originally published as a series of novellas. Four in total, between 1985 and 1987, in the “Anticipations” collection of the Fleuve Noir publishing house (it was still in this era where in France fantasy and sci-fi were sold together as one and the same). Later, the four novellas were collected into one full volume, one novel divided into four parts. This complete volume was published in 2000 (in a small format by the J’ai Lu Poche Fantasy, in a large format by Denoël collection Lunes d'encre), and it is both the version I read and the one most people refer to when talking about “Les flammes de la nuit”. I do not know if the text was edited or slightly rewritten for this new format – I don’t think so, but I have to admit the text felt so much like an early 2000s story I was quite surprised it came from the mid-80s… There’s quite notably the fact the main character is openly bisexual, but hey, the 80s in France were quite a time too… More recently in 2014 Les Moutons Electrique republished the integral in a large format, and then in 2022 in a middle format, proving this novel’s great and enduring success.

 [Note: As I am writing this post I made a quick checklist and I just discovered that Michel Pagel actually was the French translator of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and American Gods, as well as of Gary Gygax’s Monster Manual for D&D… Wow, that was a total surprise – and it does explain some things, I notably see how Neil Gaiman’s writing could have had an influence over this novel…]

Let me briefly set you in the mood the very first pages plunge the reader into… We follow an old man who is travelling on a pilgrimage to a great lake at the center of a medieval kingdom name Fuinör. He isn’t just any old man: it is but one of his masks. He is the Enchanter, a great and powerful wizard as old as the universe itself, a supernatural being known to take many forms, and who can be as much a wild animal of omens as a seducing woman luring knights to an uncertain doom… Once he reaches the great lake, called the Mirror for its still waters form the perfect reflection of the sky and the sun above it, in a great burst of light, the sun disappears… and reappears. But the sun is not golden anymore: it is green. And with the sun everything changed color within Fuinör: the sky is not blue but indigo, the sea is the color of emerald, the trees have blue leaves, human skin is orange… And this is perfectly normal, for in the world of Fuinör, every seven years the sun is reborn above the lake, turning into a different color, and with it everything in the world also changes its hue. And as such, seven year by seven year, the light goes through all the seven colors of the rainbow…

This sets the stage for what “Les flammes de la nuit” is. And it is many, many things, a story which likes the sun of Fuinör undergoes different stages and tones (the serial publication helps this feeling of slow transition and evolution throughout the novel).

The story opens as an open, cynical and dark parody of fairytales – for the world of Fuinör is a world of stock fairytales. It is a world in which, when the king has a daughter, seven fairies, each for each color of the rainbow, arrive to bless her with all the usual gifts – beauty, grace, singing – while carefully avoiding anything like strength or intelligence, for these are male gifts for those destined to rule. It is a world in which, when the queen gives an heir to her king (and there is always only one king and one queen), she must die in labor – and if she happens to survive… then the royal doctor must prepare a certain powder to make sure the queen respects the tradition. It is a world where barons often declare themselves vile rebels and wicked usurpers and try to overthrow the high king… but they are always defeated because the law claims there can only be one rebellion at a time, and each baron must warn in advance the king and let him decide how, when and where he wants to do the battle. It is a world where there is a land for each thing – quite literally. Fuinör is divided into different “countries” each dedicated to a specific area: there is a land of Hunting, where the hunts take place, and any hunting elsewhere is outlawed. There is a land for War, and nobody would ever think of waging war elsewhere than there. There is a land for Love, and all love and romance and sex can only take place within its boundaries. Such as the laws, and the customs, and the traditions, and they have always been since the beginning of time…

Fuinör is a mix of all the classical fairytales and the traditional medieval romance and Arthurian tales – but all taken to an extreme. Fuinör is a world stuck in an endless cycle of loops, where the events all repeat themselves in the same way with predictable end, where everyone is given a specific role and fate since birth, where everything is stuck under an order that has been decided by ominous gods a long time ago, and where no surprise and no disorder can ever happen. The brave knights in shining armor always win the heart of princesses, the high king is always victorious of anyone that tries to take his throne – and if someone ever does, THEY are the rightful high king and the other is the usurper – and the peasants… well who cares, they don’t count, they’re not even considered human, they are just here to work and be background props.

But things will change… Things will change thanks to the Enchanter, who decides that when the new princess of the kingdom is born, little Rowena, she shall receive a gift no other princess ever received… the gift of intelligence. An intelligence that will allow her to understand the absurd logic of her world, and use the sclerosis of archetypes and the rigidity of millennia-old customs to her advantage. An intelligence that will make her greater and more powerful than anyone – an intelligence that will threaten the very existence of Fuinör… Thus is the beginning of “Les Flammes de la Nuit”.

The beginning of the novel, Rowena’s own youth and story, is clearly designed to deconstruct all the archetypes, stereotypes and point out all the bad side of both the generic fairytale (especially Disney’s version of fairytales – the novel is filled with jabs at Disney and the “Americanized” fairytale, the seven fairies being basically Disney’s fairy godmothers mixed with Glinda from The Wizard of Oz MGM movie) and of the Arthurian romance as we know it today. It does not mean Michel Pagel hates those genres, quite the contrary! This book heavily pays homage to both domain, in which Pagel has clearly a great interest. In fact, this book is much more “medieval romance/Arthurian epic” than fairytale in tone, and while anybody who saw the Disney movies or read Perrault will get the fairytale references, I do believe someone with zero knowledge of the Arthuriana will miss a LOT of cultural jokes and clever references in this text. From the get go the Enchanter is clearly supposed to be inspired by Merlin from the Arthurian myth – but not the Disneyified, Americanized Merlin. The original Merlin, Myrddinn, the mythical, legendary, ambiguous and terrifying entity that exists beyond shapes and times and manipulates fate as he pleases… In a similar way, if you haven’t done any research on the evolution of the legend of Avalon you won’t get how twisted and cool the climax within the domain of the Fairies is… But I won’t reveal too much spoilers.

But loving doesn’t mean being uncritical, and this book is clearly the result of Michel Pagel thinking about what he adores, and highlighting in an entertaining way all that is wrong with those classical tales. The first part of the story is centered around Rowena, this intelligent and daring girl born within a world of the worst fairytale stereotypes and outdated medieval chivalry. And as she grows up she gets to explore what others were too afraid to explore, she understands what nobody understood, she gains power nobody had access to before… all the while suffering from what her world really is: unfair, classicist, sexist, misogynistic and abusive. And this begins already the bittersweet tone of the novel. At the same time we have a very funny parody that enjoys dark humor and plays all the code of the traditional “fractured fairytale”, and yet it alternates with very sad and dark moments where Rowena is confronted with the cruelties of such a universe and understands why being an intelligent girl in a world where women are to be submissive and stupid can be dangerous. But all is in fact set and prepared for her own fate, prepared by the Enchanter in person: for Rowena will become… the Witch.

And of course I love this, because who doesn’t get to love a dark retelling of fairytales, who doesn’t like a faithful retelling of medieval epics with an acute sense of modern values clashing with outdated morals, who doesn’t get to love the story of how a girl became a witch-queen? But… I think this is where the “fracture” with a certain part of the audience happened. I will return to the reviews I talked about above: many people thought the ending was worthless or were betrayed by it. Having read the novel I understand why they felt that: in their own words, they were sold and expected a feminist retelling of fairytales about breaking conventions and stereotypes. They were sold the story of a girl being a hero, and the old fairytale clichés being mercilessly mocked and denounced and beaten upon. And that was it for them. As such, yes, the ending probably disappointed them… Because it isn’t what the story is about.

It is made clear in the beginning of the story: being a Witch is not a pleasant thing. It is not a power fantasy. It might look like it, and Rowena uses it as such, but we are clearly warned that a Witch is still an unpleasant, dangerous and sometimes disgusting existence which will require suffering, both inflicted by the Witch and received by her. It is in such a path Rowena sets herself upon – and this is part of a greater scope of things. Rowena is the main character of the novel, but she is part of a wider plot by the Enchanter. The Enchanter wants to break the endless, frozen cycle of Fuinör. He wants to destroy those paralyzing traditions and this unnatural order. He wants to plunge back the world into chaos – a benevolent, needed, positive chaos, but a chaos still. And one of the very strong messages of this tale is: a need to go beyond Manicheism. To go beyond simplistic duality or archetypal characters. What Rowena, and the Enchanter, and others later, bring is complexity. The entire point of the novel is to go beyond the idea that there is all good and all bad, clear cut good and evil, black and white. As such, slowly as the cosmic battle wages on, as the Tradition and the Divine Law unravel, the characters grow into shades of gray as all their values, their positions and their allegiances are redefined, put to test or exposed, as the very machine of the universe starts to be pulled apart. Characters that start out as nice and lovable heroes turn into selfish villains. Characters that appear as flawed jerks and unsympathetic narrators learn from their mistake and grow heroic and wise. Courageous warriors grow into cowards, figures of sanity become mad, and this entire novel is the story of one huge revolution where everything changes: moralities, social hierarchies, laws of justice, and even genders! (The novel notably features an exploration of non-binary genders through one specific character – or three depending on how you count it – not including the various shapeshifting of the supernatural entities, which again helps make it resonate with a modern audience despite being around for quite a long time)

As such, no, this story is not a feminist power fantasy, and those that go in expecting this will be disappointed. It is a much, much larger and complex story about an entire world, about this fictional place born out of the classic fairytales and the medieval romances and the Arthuriana, and how this thing is confronted with its own choice of “evolve or die”. And this is still a very powerful and admirable story, which at the same plays subverts tropes, while also playing many clichés and stereotypes straight, but with a clear knowledge of this. Some people in the reviews said they were disappointed that ultimately, it seemed that Michel Pagel, in trying to break down and denounce clichés, ended up himself reasserting those same clichés. And I honestly do not think it is the case – as the novel is rather a strong defense of “We should get rid of all clichés and stereotypes, because they’re always going to trap us, no matter on which side they are”. But again, I can’t reveal too much without spoiling this long modern epic.

A good example of why for example this novel isn’t a pure “feminist fantasy” as many believed: Rowena is not the only main character. There’s another one, a “male counterpart” so to speak of the Witch-Queen in training. A character who doesn’t really have a name (well he has one but it is kind of a spoiler domain), and whose own backstory forms the second part of the novel (or the second novella of the series). A character who lives in a different part of Fuinör, and also should have been trapped in a cycle of millennia-old rituals and binding traditions and unfair customs, but whose fate changes completely due to the interventions of the Witch and the Enchanter… Except that, whereas with Rowena we had a bittersweet parody of Disney movies and traditional fairytales, with this second character we rather explore a deconstruction and attack of a different type of folktales. There is notably a brutal takedown of the whole “Journey of the Hero” system and the “Monomyth” idea. And I don’t say “brutal” lightly: this part of the novel is very, very brutal, physically speaking. Because this second main character is the helpful companion on the road in fairytales that helps the hero get the girl while himself having nothing. He is also the stock archetype of the Fool doomed to make mistakes and be ridiculed or punished. And he is the False Pretender, the False Hero of fairytales here to put in value the True Hero… Except we are told the story through his point of view. Except he is not evil, he is a guy who is trying his best but is put in an unfair position and only gets endless bullying. Except the True Hero doesn’t seem to be deserving of his position, and the question is raised of “Maybe the other guy should have been the Hero”… But here we shift into a fantasy version of what Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” was and we fully explore the magical dystopia that is Fuinör.

Overall I do have to say… I think so far the closest thing I have seen in terms of overall tone and ambiance, in the English-speaking world, to compare these works… would be Dimension 20’s season “Neverafter”. Both works deal with a very funny parody but also very dark twisting of fairytales and folktales. Both deal with characters being abused and going through horrors at the end of great cosmic powers and otherworldly narrators. Both tread between comedy and horror ; and both deal with the protagonists’ attempt at breaking endless cycles set upon by fairies (because, in both Pagel’s novel and Dimension 20, the fairies are one of the numerous antagonists as the ruthless and terrifying enforcers of the “laws of fairytales” that get everybody stuck in their roles and functions). Of course, the two works are very different beyond that… But there is a common bone.

A final element I need to add so that you get a full understanding of this novel: Michel Pagel placed his book under the patronage of Shakespeare. And if the fact every part opens with a quote from one of Shakespeare’s play, from Hamlet to Macbeth passing by Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and more, wasn’t enough, anyone versed in Shakespearian studies will see how among the many archetypes and stock tropes of the novel, those of Shakespeare also regularly pop up. Someone once wrote that this novel started out as a fairytale parody, but slowly evolved into a Shakespearian tragedy, and I cannot agree more. It does start out as a dark and morbid but entertaining parody – and then things get really brutal, really violent, really sad, really serious, and we enter a terrible and dreary fantasy, but still very poetic and very human, that moves towards a universe where all of Shakespeare’s greatest cruelties fit right at home. The novel most notably has a lot, a LOT of fun exploring the Shakespearian archetype of the “Fool”. There’s almost two handfuls of characters that each is meant to explore a different aspect of the Shakespearian Fool, each expressing a difference nuance of it (the famous non-binary character is one of them, paying homage to the typical gender-plays and gender-questioning within Shakespeare’s plays) – and I am glad to be a Shakespeare enjoyer when reading this novel because again, a random person with zero Shakespeare knowledge would miss a lot of things. (Which again is I believe the reason the Internet reviews attacked this novel, there is a certain degree of medieval and literary knowledge needed to get the parts of this novel that pay homage to the older texts and more ancient roots of the clichéd, Disneyified myths we have today… Without it the novel can still be read, but it might seem much weirder and bleaker than it truly is)

Finally a flaw, because there needs to be a flaw in every review, it can’t all be glowing: I do admit that of the four parts composing this novel, the fourth one did felt unbalanced. Notably the author seemed to spend too much time, description and effort on characters barely introduced (which at the ending climax of a story is not good), and not enough on the characters we were following since the very beginning… But I will blame that on the fact the fourth part was originally meant to be an independent novella read one year after the last part was published. I do believe that, while putting the full series in one volume is quite convenient if you want to buy something to read over holidays, it does make one feel a bit tired by the end since you literally absorb four years of writing into one go… So, my advice would be to enjoy this book by making pauses between each part, to not do an “overdose” that would be too abrupt.

Or two flaw, I feel generous: when it comes to the second part, it felt a tad bit repetitive. A tad bit too much repetitive. I get that we are supposed to have a hopeful character that is trying his best to make things work and obtain what he wishes for, and we are supposed to fully get the injustice of the situation and the hardness of this world… But precisely because of how it explores casual violence and vicious brutality, the repetitiveness is felt more. It’s a type of “break the cutie” (who isn’t here so much a “cutie” as a morally neutral human being) scenario, and I am not well placed to say if the author did just enough or too much.

[Edit: I do love how the original covers for the 80s series tried their best to make it seem like a full horror series... when it is not]

[aisakalegacy]

[Transcription] Recto : 437 - rue Saint-Laurent. Le café Saint-Michel. Verso : POSTCARD. [Carte potale.] Post Office. [Bureau de poste.] This space is for writing [Cette partie est pour écrire] : Chère cousine Noé, Une petite carte pour te souhaiter le bonjour de Montréal. Ma mission n’est pas couronnée de succès pour l’instant, mais si le cousin Ange devait se trouver au Canada, je lui recommande le Café Saint-Michel. Je t’embrasse affectueusement. Ton cousin, Lucien. This space is for address only [Cette partie est uniquement destinée à l’adresse] : Mademoiselle Arsinoé Le Bris. La Butte aux Chênes. Champs-les-Sims. Seine-et-Oise (France).

[adarkrainbow]

A class on fairy tales (1)

As you might know (since I have been telling it for quite some times), I had a class at university which was about fairy tales, their history and evolution. But from a literary point of view - I am doing literary studies at university, it was a class of “Literature and Human sciences”, and this year’s topic was fairy tales, or rather “contes” as we call them in France. It was twelve seances, and I decided, why not share the things I learned and noted down here? (The titles of the different parts of this post are actually from me. The original notes are just a non-stop stream, so I broke them down for an easier read)

I) Book lists

The class relied on a main corpus which consisted of the various fairytales we studied - texts published up to the “first modernity” and through which the literary genre of the fairytale established itself. In chronological order they were: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile, Le Piacevoli Notti by Giovan Francesco Straparola, the various fairytales of Charles Perrault, the fairytales of Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and finally the Kinder-und Hausmärchen of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. There is also a minor mention for the fables of Faerno, not because they played an important historical role like the others, but due to them being used in comparison to Perrault’s fairytales ; there is also a mention of the fairytales of Leprince de Beaumont if I remember well. 

After giving us this main corpus, we were given a second bibliography containing the most famous and the most noteworthy theorical tools when it came to fairytales - the key books that served to theorize the genre itself. The teacher who did this class deliberatly gave us a “mixed list”, with works that went in completely opposite directions when it came to fairytale, to better undersant the various differences among “fairytale critics” - said differences making all the vitality of the genre of the fairytale, and of the thoughts on fairytales. Fairytales are a very complex matter. 

For example, to list the English-written works we were given, you find, in chronological order: Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment ; Jack David Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion ; Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men ; Marie-Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairy Tales ; Lewis C. Seifert, Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France (1670-1715) ; and Cristina Bacchilega’s Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies. If you know the French language, there are two books here: Jacques Barchilon’s Le conte merveilleux français de 1690 à 1790 ; and Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann’s Textualité et intertextualité des contes. We were also given quite a few German works, such as Märchenforschung und Tiefenpsychologie by Wilhelm Laiblin, Nachwort zu Deutsche Volksmärchen von arm und reich, by Waltraud Woeller ; or Märchen, Träume, Schicksale by Otto Graf Wittgenstein. And of course, the bibliography did not forget the most famous theory-tools for fairytales: Vladimir Propp’s Morfologija skazki + Poetika, Vremennik Otdela Slovesnykh Iskusstv ; as well as the famous Classification of Aarne Anti, Stith Thompson and Hans-Jörg Uther (the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification, aka the ATU). 

By compiling these works together, one will be able to identify the two main “families” that are rivals, if not enemies, in the world of the fairytale criticism. Today it is considered that, roughly, if we simplify things, there are two families of scholars who work and study the fairy tales. One family take back the thesis and the theories of folklorists - they follow the path of those who, starting in the 19th century, put forward the hypothesis that a “folklore” existed, that is to say a “poetry of the people”, an oral and popular literature. On the other side, you have those that consider that fairytales are inscribed in the history of literature, and that like other objects of literature (be it oral or written), they have intertextual relationships with other texts and other forms of stories. So they hold that fairytales are not “pure, spontaneous emanations”. (And given this is a literary class, given by a literary teacher, to literary students, the teacher did admit their bias for the “literary family” and this was the main focus of the class).

Which notably led us to a third bibliography, this time collecting works that massively changed or influenced the fairytale critics - but this time books that exclusively focused on the works of Perrault and Grimm, and here again we find the same divide folklore VS textuality and intertextuality. It is Marc Soriano’s Les contes de Perrault: culture savante et traditions populaires, it is Ernest Tonnelat’s Les Contes des frères Grimm: étude sur la composition et le style du recueil des Kinder-und-Hausmärchen ; it is Jérémie Benoit’s Les Origines mythologiques des contes de Grimm ; it is Wilhelm Solms’ Die Moral von Grimms Märchen ; it is Dominqiue Leborgne-Peyrache’s Vies et métamorphoses des contes de Grimm ; it is Jens E. Sennewald’ Das Buch, das wir sind: zur Poetik der Kinder und-Hausmärchen ; it is Heinz Rölleke’s Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: eine Einführung. No English book this time, sorry.

II) The Germans were French, and the French Italians

The actual main topic of this class was to consider the “fairytale” in relationship to the notions of “intertextuality” and “rewrites”. Most notably there was an opening at the very end towards modern rewrites of fairytales, such as Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, “Le petit chaperon vert” (Little Green Riding Hood) or “La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes” (The princess who didn’t like princes). But the main subject of the class was to see how the “main corpus” of classic fairytales, the Perrault, the Grimm, the Basile and Straparola fairytales, were actually entirely created out of rewrites. Each text was rewriting, or taking back, or answering previous texts - the history of fairytales is one of constant rewrite and intertextuality. 

For example, if we take the most major example, the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. What are the sources of the brothers? We could believe, like most people, that they merely collected their tale. This is what they called, especially in the last edition of their book: they claimed to have collected their tales in regions of Germany. It was the intention of the authors, it was their project, and since it was the will and desire of the author, it must be put first. When somebody does a critical edition of a text, one of the main concerns is to find the way the author intended their text to pass on to posterity. So yes, the brothers Grimm claimed that their tales came from the German countryside, and were manifestations of the German folklore. 

But... in truth, if we look at the first editions of their book, if we look at the preface of their first editions, we discover very different indications, indications which were checked and studied by several critics, such as Ernest Tomelas. In truth, one of their biggest sources was... Charles Perrault. While today the concept of the “tales of the little peasant house, told by the fireside” is the most prevalent one, in their first edition the brothers Grimm explained that their sources for these tales were not actually old peasant women, far from it: they were ladies, of a certain social standing, they were young women, born of exiled French families (because they were Protestants, and thus after the revocation of the édit de Nantes in France which allowed a peaceful coexistance of Catholics and Protestants, they had to flee to a country more welcoming of their religion, aka Germany). They were young women of the upper society, girls of the nobility, they were educated, they were quite scholarly - in fact, they worked as tutors/teachers and governess/nursemaids for German children. For children of the German nobility to be exact. And these young French women kept alive the memory of the French literature of the previous century - which included the fairytales of Perrault.

So, through these women born of the French emigration, one of the main sources of the Grimm turns out to be Perrault. And in a similar way, Perrault’s fairytales actually have roots and intertextuality with older tales, Italian fairytales. And from these Italian fairytales we can come back to roots into Antiquity itself - we are talking Apuleius, and Virgil before him, and Homer before him, this whole classical, Latin-Greek literature. This entire genealogy has been forgotten for a long time due to the enormous surge, the enormous hype, the enormous fascination for the study of folklore at the end of the 19th century and throughout all of the 20th. 

We talk of “types of fairytales”, if we talk of Vladimir Propp, if we talk of Aarne Thompson, we are speaking of the “morphology of fairytales”, a name which comes from the Russian theorician that is Propp. Most people place the beginning of the “structuralism” movement in the 70s, because it is in 1970 that the works of Propp became well-known in France, but again there is a big discrepancy between what people think and what actually is. It is true that starting with the 70s there was a massive wave, during which Germans, Italians and English scholars worked on Propp’s books, but Propp had written his studies much earlier than that, at the beginning of the 20th century. The first edition of his Morphology of fairytales was released in 1928. While it was reprinted and rewriten several times in Russia, it would have to wait for roughly fifty years before actually reaching Western Europe, where it would become the fundamental block of the “structuralist grammar”. This is quite interesting because... when France (and Western Europe as a whole) adopted structuralism, when they started to read fairytales under a morphological and structuralist angle, they had the feeling and belief, they were convinced that they were doing a “modern” criticism of fairytales, a “new” criticism. But in truth... they were just repeating old theories and conceptions, snatched away from the original socio-historical context in which Propp had created them - aka the Soviet Union and a communist regime. People often forget too quickly that contextualizing the texts isn’t only good for the studied works, we must also contextualize the works of critics and the analysis of scholars. Criticism has its own history, and so unlike the common belief, Propp’s Morphology of fairytales isn’t a text of structuralist theoricians from the 70s. It was a text of the Soviet Union, during the Interwar Period. 

So the two main questions of this class are. 1) We will do a double exploration to understand the intertextual relationships between fairytales. And 2) We will wonder about the definition of a “fairytale” (or rather of a “conte” as it is called in French) - if the fairytale is indeed a literary genre, then it must have a definition, key elements. And from this poetical point of view, other questions come forward: how does one analyze a fairytale? What does a fairytale mean?

III) Feuding families

Before going further, we will pause to return to a subject talked about above: the great debate among scholars and critics that lasted for decades now, forming the two branches of the fairytale study. One is the “folklorist” branch, the one that most people actually know without realizing it. When one works on fairytale, one does folklorism without knowing it, because we got used to the idea that fairytale are oral products, popular products, that are present everywhere on Earth, we are used to the concept of the universality of motives and structures of fairytales. In the “folklorist” school of thought, there is an universalism, and not only are fairytales present everywhere, but one can identify a common core for them. It can be a categorization of characters, it can be narrative functions, it can be roles in a story, but there is always a structure or a core. As a result, the work of critics who follow this branch is to collect the greatest number of “versions” of a same tale they can find, and compare them to find the smallest common denominator. From this, they will create or reconstruct the “core fairytale”, the “type” or the “source” from which the various variations come from.

Before jumping onto the other family, we will take a brief time to look at the history of the “folklorist branch” of the critic. (Though, to summarize the main differences, the other family of critics basically claims that we do not actually know the origin of these stories, but what we know are rather the texts of these stories, the written archives or the oral records). 

So the first family here (that is called “folklorist” for the sake of simplicity, but it is not an official or true appelation) had been extremely influenced by the works of a famous and talented scholar of the early 20th century: Aarne Antti, a scholar of Elsinki who collected a large number of fairytales and produced out of them a classification, a typology based on this theory that there is an “original fairytale type” that existed at the beginning, and from which variants appeared. His work was then continued by two other scholars: Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther. This continuation gave birth to the “Aarne-Thompson” classification, a classification and bibliography of folkloric fairytales from around the world, which is very often used in journals and articles studying fairytales. Through them, the idea of “types” of fairytales and “variants” imposed itself in people’s minds, where each tale corresponds to a numbered category, depending on the subjects treated and the ways the story unfolds (for example an entire category of tale collects the “animal-husbands”. This classification imposed itself on the Western way of thinking at the end of the first third of the 20th century.

The next step in the history of this type of fairytale study was Vladimir Propp. With his Morphology of fairytales, we find the same theory, the same principle of classification: one must collect the fairytales from all around the world, and compare them to find the common denominator. Propp thought Aarne-Thompson’s work was interesting, but he did complain about the way their criteria mixed heterogenous elements, or how the duo doubled criterias that could be unified into one. Propp noted that, by the Aarne-Thompson system, a same tale could have two different numbers - he concluded that one shouldn’t classify tales by their subject or motif. He claimed that dividing the fairytales by “types” was actually impossible, that this whole theory was more of a fiction than an actual reality. So, he proposed an alternate way of doing things, by not relying on the motifs of fairytales: Propp rather relied on their structure. Propp doesn’t deny the existence of fairytales, he doesn’t put in question the categorization of fairytales, or the universality of fairytales, on all that he joins Aarne-Thompson. But what he does is change the typology, basing it on “functions”: for him, the constituve parts of fairytales are “functions”, which exist in limited numbers and follow each other per determined orders (even if they are not all “activated”). He identified 31 functions, that can be grouped into three groups forming the canonical schema of the fairytale according to Propp. These three groups are an initial situation with seven functions, followed by a first sequence going from the misdeed (a bad action, a misfortune, a lack) to its reparation, and finally there is a second sequence which goes from the return of the hero to its reward. From these seven “preparatory functions”, forming the initial situation, Propp identified seven character profiles, defined by their functions in the narrative and not by their unique characteristics. These seven profiles are the Aggressor (the villain), the Donor (or provider), the Auxiliary (or adjuvant), the Princess, the Princess’ Father, the Mandator, the Hero, and the False Hero. This system will be taken back and turned into a system by Greimas, with the notion of “actants”: Greimas will create three divisions, between the subject and the object, between the giver and the gifted, and between the adjuvant and the opposant.

With his work, Vladimir Propp had identified the “structure of the tale”, according to his own work, hence the name of the movement that Propp inspired: structuralism. A structure and a morphology - but Propp did mention in his texts that said morphology could only be applied to fairytales taken from the folklore (that is to say, fairytales collected through oral means), and did not work at all for literary fairytales (such as those of Perrault). And indeed, while this method of study is interesting for folkloric fairytales, it becomes disappointing with literary fairytales - and it works even less for novels. Because, trying to find the smallest denominator between works is actually the opposite of literary criticism, where what is interesting is the difference between various authors. It is interesting to note what is common, indeed, but it is even more interesting to note the singularities and differences. Anyway, the apparition of the structuralist study of fairytales caused a true schism among the field of literary critics, between those that believe all tales must be treated on a same way, with the same tools (such as those of Propp), and those that are not satisfied with this “universalisation” that places everything on the same level. 

This second branch is the second family we will be talking about: those that are more interested by the singularity of each tale, than by their common denominators and shared structures. This second branch of analysis is mostly illustrated today by the works of Ute Heidmann, a German/Swiss researcher who published alongside Jean Michel Adam (a specialist of linguistic, stylistic and speech-analysis) a fundamental work in French: Textualité et intertextualité des contes: Perrault, Apulée, La Fontaine, Lhéritier... (Textuality and intertextuality of fairytales). A lot of this class was inspired by Heidmann and Adam’s work, which was released in 2010. Now, this book is actually surrounded by various articles posted before and after, and Ute Heidmann also directed a collective about the intertextuality of the brothers Grimm fairytales. Heidmann did not invent on her own the theories of textuality and intertextuality - she relies on older researches, such as those of the Ernest Tonnelat, who in 1912 published a study of the brothers Grimm fairytales focusing on the first edition of their book and its preface. This was where the Grimm named the sources of their fairytales: girls of the upper class, not at all small peasants, descendants of the protestant (huguenots) noblemen of France who fled to Germany. Tonnelat managed to reconstruct, through these sources, the various element that the Grimm took from Perrault’s fairytales. This work actually weakened the folklorist school of thought, because for the “folklorist critics”, when a similarity is noted between two fairytales, it is a proof of “an universal fairytale type”, an original fairytale that must be reconstructed. But what Tonnelat and other “intertextuality critics” pushed forward was rather the idea that “If the story of the Grimm is similar but not identical to the one of Perrault, it is because they heard a modified version of Perrault’s tale, a version modified either by the Grimms or by the woman that told them the tale, who tried to make the story more or less horrible depending on the situation”. This all fragilized the idea of an “original, source-fairytale”, and encouraged other researchers to dig this way.

For example, the case was taken up by Heinz Rölleke, in 1985: he systematized the study of the sources of the Grimm, especially the sources that tied them to the fairytales of Perrault. Now, all the works of this branch of critics does not try to deny or reject the existence of fairytales all over the world. And it does not forget that all over the world, human people are similar and have the same preoccupations (life, love, death, war, peace). So, of course, there is an universality of the themes, of the motives, of the intentions of the texts. Because they are human texts, so there is an universality of human fiction. But there is here the rejection of a topic, a theory, a question that can actually become VERY dangerous. (For example, in post World War II Germany, all researches about fairytales were forbidden, because during their reign the Nazis had turned the fairytales the Grimm into an abject ideological tool). This other family, vein, branch of critics, rather focuses on the specificity of each writing style, of each rewrite of a fairytale, but also on the various receptions and interpretations of fairytales depending on the context of their writing and the context of their reading. So the idea behind this “intertextuality study” is to study the fairytales like the rest of literature, be it oral or written, and to analyze them with the same philological tools used by history studies, by sociology study, by speech analysis and narrative analysis - all of that to understand what were the conditions of creation, of publication, of reading and spreading of these tales, and how they impacted culture.

[19th-century-calamity-crew]

Roleplay blog: @le-brave-des-braves

Meta information

Owner: @neylo

First post: 28th February 2024 (https://www.tumblr.com/le-brave-des-braves/743594245757222912/bienvenue-you-have-reached-my-communication)

Current pinned post: https://www.tumblr.com/le-brave-des-braves/747279352345083904/bienvenue-you-have-reached-my-communication

Characters

Main character: Michel Ney

Regular appearances: his aides-de-camp Octave Levavasseur, Pierre-Agathe Heymes (both pictured here) and Antoine-Henri Jomini

Irregular appearances: His family, in the Ney's painted paradise thread

Lore

Supernatural characteristics:

This version of Michel Ney has been granted wings by an anonymous message and still retains them. He also carries marks of his execution in the form of dark spots in place of the original gunshot wounds that occasionally show under stressful conditions. This kind of state can also result in a temporary delay of another bodily death.

As of Ney's Painted Paradise, it has been revealed that this version of Ney is able to manipulate the fabric of the afterworld. He does so on instinct, however, and is unable to consciously control the results.

With the manifestation of these powers, his appearance underwent several major changes.

His blood appears to have a golden sunset colour now, which is also present in golden streaks in his otherwise light blue irises.

When changing his surroundings, his eyes go to full gold and he re-gains his wings, which he no longer has by default. The lighting also takes on a sunset hue in the area.

The colour of his wings has been established as coppery red.

Realm:

An ever-shifting tangle of sceneries. A somewhat stable Chateau Bessonies (currently vacant/undergoing reconstruction)

In Ney's Painted Paradise, his realm starts out as a simulacrum of content family life based on several peaceful memories he has. It also contains places based on his regrets though and is for a long time actively hostile towards intruders, mostly forcing a long-forgotten corporeal form onto them, one so incompatible with the surrounding substances that they are toxic to it.

Stories (not exhaustive, regular size text for longer threads:)

-Assisted marshal Lannes who consumed a dubious brownie

-Received his birthday mail two months late and got covered in glitter

-Levavasseur confessed his feelings for his Marshal with a serenade, was rejected

-The Marshal was granted wings, immediately invented aerial fencing. Meanwhile, Jomini returned.

-Discovered Rammstein. This will play a role later.

-Jomini rediscovers the joy of mutual disdain with Berthier, would not apologise properly over his own dead body

-Ney's aides-de-camp are granted wings. Some of them are more happy with them than others.

-Everyone has beef with Napoleon, nobody wants to risk fighting and potentially hurting Lannes, so the Emperor gets out of it this time.

-Soult was turned into a dragon. Berthier's house is flooded by plants. Was it a good idea to start a fire? No.

-Fairy dust can heal burned wings. It also temporarily diminishes the ability to filter your words.

-the twice-heartbroken Levavasseur, after receiving lots of mostly dubious advice, decides to care as he always did. The Marshal does hold him dear.

-Ney is transformed into his 23 year old self

-The wings are healing too slowly, Ney is disheartened

-And gets pep talked by Soult of all people

-Meanwhile, Jomini pockets a potion and makes a bad decision

-Ney and his aides-de-camp move to Soult's domain temporarily. Their host is turned into a cat. Things get very awkward

-The Marshals have a meeting over being turned into female versions of themselves. The workplace violence that follows results in Ney's disappearance.

-To a seemingly idyllic place where all is preserved as it was in days of happiness. But not all is as it seems... - finished

18th of June - that date carries a lot of bad memories. What happens when they come to life?

Upon learning he can accidentally project his trauma into a wide area of the afterlife, Ney decides to find an area that doesn't have people in it. He is stopped in his tracks by a very familiar-looking eight-year-old... (Ongoing)

Drop off a wedding gift and disappear - the plan was simple. But no plan has ever survived first contact with a child... Or Murat, for that matter. (Ongoing)

So Ney is able to shift the fabric of reality. But what exactly do these powers entail? Ney, Soult and their staff officers run some experiments to find out. (Ongoing)