Feeling Awkward?

In a social situation? Here are some tips on how to mingle. Share

Mathilde Kschessinska

The Sword and the Sea has a review about a new biography about the fascinating Russian prima ballerina assoluta, Mathilde Kschessinska. Share

The Jesuits in England

Author Stephanie Mann reports. Share

Two Novels about John Donne

Sarah Johnson of the Historical Novel Society reviews them. Share

Olympe de Gouges

An early French feminist who was against the violence of the Revolution and the murder of the King.

A passionate advocate of human rights, Olympe de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women.

In 1791, she became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. Also called the "Social Club", members sometimes gathered at the home of the well-known women's rights advocate, Sophie de Condorcet. Here, De Gouges expressed, for the first time, her famous statement, "A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform." 

That same year, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote the Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen). This was followed by her Contrat Social (Social Contract, named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), proposing marriage based upon gender equality.

She became involved in almost any matter she believed to involve injustice. She opposed the execution of Louis XVI of France, partly out of opposition to capital punishment and partly because she preferred a relatively tame and living king to the possibility of a rebel regency in exile. This earned her the ire of many hard-line republicans, even into the next generation—such as the comment by the nineteenth century historian Jules Michelet, a fierce apologist for the Revolution, who wrote, "She allowed herself to act and write about more than one affair that her weak head did not understand."

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The Coffee Shop Writer

Working at the cafe. According to author Malcolm Gladwell: "The problem with writing in coffee shops is that everyone hates the kind of people who write in coffee shops—especially the kind of people who write in coffee shops." Share

Remembering Joe Sobran

Some thoughts from R.J. Stove. To quote:

Reading Joe’s stuff back then became both exhilarating and saddening. Exhilarating, because of the seeming ease with which he eviscerated totalitarians of every hue. Saddening, because one knew that one could never write half as well as he. On the whole, the exhilaration outweighed the sadness, or else I would have ceased to study his output. But if anyone had told me in those days that I would actually come to know Joe in person, I would have responded with some embryonically paleocon remark like “Pull the other one, it plays the Habsburg imperial anthem.” (Protracted exposure to Kuehnelt-Leddihn tends to induce this type of metaphor.)

In Renaissance Tuscany, the term used to denote such writing as Joe’s was sprezzatura, that almost untranslatable noun that can be only approximately rendered in English as “staggering erudition worn with the utmost nonchalance.” I never quite dared to talk of sprezzatura to Joe (because I could imagine his scornful response: “Sprezzatura? I always did hate Italian food!”). Yet that quality was what I most cherished in Joe’s thought. Insofar as I can trace my own authorial evolution to something like a stylist, increasing exposure to Joe’s articles had much to do with the development.

Still, the very effortlessness of Joe’s literary manner seemed to preclude anything like personal acquaintanceship with him. Besides, for the polymathic, unaffectedly devout, and quintessentially Midwestern Joe, my background (that of a non-American nurtured among unbelievers and with the patchiest sort of formal education) surely ticked all the wrong boxes. Of how I originally made contact with him, I no longer recall the details. I think that I was so staggered by the exceptional brilliance of one Sobran column — “Victims of Music” — that I overcame my habitual shyness and wrote to him in care of Universal Press Syndicate, which then syndicated his work, to say that he had surpassed himself with that piece. His response, far from being bearish, encouraged me to write more frequently (it was at his insistence that I started calling him "Joe" rather than "Mr. Sobran"). E-mail proved a means of communication well attuned to his free-wheeling approach. How often of a morning, after a fairly horrid previous day, did I turn on my computer and have my spirits raised by the sight of those welcome boldface words “Joe Sobran” in my inbox.

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What Ever Happened to Modernism?

A literary revolution.

Modernism, as conventionally understood, was an early 20th- century movement that affected all the arts; it simultaneously broke with tradition and drew self-consciously on tradition. The great modernist figures include Picasso and Francis Bacon in painting and Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, all of whom figure in Mr. Josipovici's account. But his main concern is with literature: Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Wallace Stevens and Thomas Mann, among a host of others. Mr. Josipovici, it should be said, is a champion of Modernism. He sees it as a valuable tradition in its own right, one that is not merely endangered but virtually extinct, especially in the smug, ultra-Philistine realm of contemporary British fiction.

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L'évasion de Louis XVI (2009)

From left to right: Madame de Tourzel, the Dauphin Louis-Charles, Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI, Madame Royale, Madame Elisabeth

As I have said before, Louis XVI is grossly misrepresented in most films and novels and even in many biographies. However, a remarkable film debuted on French television last year. It is L'évasion de Louis XVI. and it portrays Louis XVI as never before in a popular drama, during his brave attempt to save his family from the violence of the Revolution. Based upon the remarkable scholarship of Jean-Christian Petitfils, King Louis is the central character; he is shown as the virile and courageous Louis whom I encountered in my research for Trianon. Madame Elisabeth is depicted in the film; the pious sister of the King is usually ignored in movies. The film is said to be well-cast and well-acted, with the young actress who plays Madame Royale resembling the princess to perfection. As with most of the quality works dealing with the royal family, the film is only available in French.

Trailer: HERE.

Review from Le Figaro: HERE.

 Discussion by the experts, HERE. Share