France
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘France’
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
Louis XIV picked up the reins of power in France vowing to drive the national economy in the common interest, not his own.
Louis XIV of France (r. 1643-1715) ruled France for seventy-two years, and as Victor Duruy records here, his intentions were good. He aspired to be a father to his subjects, to better their lives by skilfully-crafted legislation, to support their daily needs and to narrow the gap between rich and poor. He also records that the king’s well-meant management of other people’s lives ended as it usually does.
When Saint-Mars arrived to take over as warden of the Bastille in 1698, staff at Paris’s most famous prison had eyes only for his prisoner.
When in 1660 King Charles II quitted the French court and returned to England, the parliamentary restraints laid upon him left Louis XIV aghast, and the ‘Sun King’ made sure to radiate his power through a network of chosen ministers, soldiers, civil servants and innumerable spies. Many illustrious names were gaoled without appeal or hope of release, but the most famous prisoner has no name at all.
Richard the Lionheart told Philip, the martial Bishop of Dreux, to decide whether he was a bishop or a knight.
During the Third Crusade, Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais, spread the rumour that Richard the Lionheart had procured the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat; and after Richard was taken prisoner in Austria in 1192 he tried to make his detention as long and unpleasant as he could. In 1197, three years after his release, Richard stumbled across an opportunity for payback.
When Richard I heard that the town of Verneuil in Normandy was under threat, he made a vow that few could be expected to take so literally.
On March 20th, 1194, Richard I returned to England after two years of captivity to Leopold of Austria, with whom he had quarrelled on the Crusades. Richard’s brother John, who had tried to keep him locked up as long as possible, fled to the protection of Philip II of France; but barely a month had passed before Richard quitted his capital yet again, and was on his way back to Normandy.
Victor Hugo berates the general public for crediting everything they do themselves to their supposedly wonderful Government.
L’Homme Qui Rit (1869) is a novel by Victor Hugo, who took as his theme the miseries set in train by acts of arbitrary power; though his story was set in England during the reign of King James II (1685-1688), France in his own day, under Napoleon III, was uppermost in his mind. In this passage, Hugo takes a moment to reflect ruefully on the way that the public idolises the Power of the State.