The Last Libertines

      . . . . We've been having some nice weather again, finally, this week.  It is much appreciated.  But now NOLA Reconnect 2 finished, we wonder how we will be making money for awhile.  We can't travel, that's for sure, for a very long time, whether we are vaccinated or not.  By which I mean, we can't take Travelers to experiences in Cuba or Haiti until ... when?  Even when we can, from now on, having plans in place for dealing with Travelers who may become ill with Covid, have to be part of work.  And in the meantime, who knows when Cuba will be able to re-open to the US?  So far the administration, doubtless concerned with myriad other equally pressing crises and concerns, hasn't rolled back the roll-back of the monster previous, though it was announced it would.

So, I read, traveling into the past.

Benedetta Craveri, (2016) The Last Libertines; New York Review of Books.

Until the last chapter, titled simply, "1789", we are in ancien régime France.  So much disappointment among the aristos, for all the luxury and leisure.  At least they ate and drank well, and were clothed in the finest of fabrics, unlike the non-poetry writing poors.

What I got from the book’s murky language – murky perhaps, due to translator, perhaps, due to French names and titles of people whom mostly we in the USA have never heard of  -- was a better sense of what drew so many younger  members of this generation of aristos to the North American colonial War of Independence, and later, to support France’s Revolution. This generation of ancient French landed, aristocratic groups, were outraged that the loss of the Seven Years War had never been avenged,  France had never regained her New World territory and both Louis XV and Louis XVI never did make war on Britain, no matter how often they began gathering troops to do so.

This is the class whose raison d’etre for existence was the glory of war, going back to the Merovingian eras, whether or not they actually could fight. Additionally, they, as that class always did, chafed under the absolutist authority of the King. After all Versailles, as we know, was built and organized by Louis XIV, for that very purpose, to keep these families under his thumb, terrified as his minority years had been by the Fronde. This was the series of 17th C French civil wars (1648-1653), within the larger Franco-Spanish war that began in 1635, attempting to overthrow Louis XIII’s monarchy, and that of his mother’s regency with Cardinal Mazarin. These anti-monarchal insurrections original intent was to protect the aristocratic families’ ancient liberties from royal encroachments. The Libertines were among the highest-ranking members of this class’s generation who thought they'd welcome a new Fronde.

But this 18th C group of aristocrats were essentially play acting in their private edifice of political-philosophe theater, just as it immersed itself in other sorts of private theatricals, put on by themselves for each other.  Marie Antoinette adored theatricals, so, see, for a single instance, the support they provided Beaumarchais’s satire of their very class, The Barber of Seville. This is how the Revolution got supported by this young bunch.

They coupled their frustrations to their Romantic idealism that supported the New World independence movement in which there were no royals or nobility, a war in which someone with ability, though poor, could become an officer. That promotion was possible without family, riches or blood -- and the 'natural nobility' of General Washington, whom they all adored -- impressed them enough they Romanticized the utterly over-taxed and utterly unprivileged of France, who were bearing the brunt of famine and rising prices due the sheer financial catastrophe that were the policies of Louis XVI financial ministers and advisers.  They seemed to miss that thousands, millions, of them, were very angry and filled with hate for their sorts, who casually oppressed and humiliated them as a matter of naturally entitled course. And there were only 700,000 of them in contrast to the millions of the third estate.

The portrait in these pages of Queen Marie Antoinette is mostly unsympathetic, though the author says the queen matured in the years shortly before the Revolution and changed into a more responsible and politically savvy mind.  After France restored the monarchy, the portrait of the Queen was burnished the class’s survivors into an innocent martyr, almost a second Virgin Mary. But for most of her life as Louis XVI’s wife and queen, she made enemies within that class, which had a great deal to do with their support of Thermidor.  She pushed her favorites into high, lucrative offices, and cut out everyone else. This was a world where all honors, power and financial preferment came through the favor of either the King or Queen – not merit, not in the least.  So even within the military, by class, nurture and tradition, always loyal to the King, officered entirely and only by this class, there was much frustration.  Yet the author fails to make these figures interesting, for the most part. They are not sympathetic sorts for my kind (though for some of the women, I can feel to a degree, and I do admire some of the art, while shuddering at the layers upon beribboned layers of ostentatious ornamentation of the clothes), though it does seem the author quite admires them.

There are errors of fact. Talleyrand never came to North America with the French during the War of Independence (he came as an exile for a short time during Washington’s presidency). France did not exchange San Domingue for Curaçao in the settlement of the Seven Years War. Or did the author claim it was exchanged for Guyana? Trinidad? both undeveloped at this time.  This claim was buried in sentence nearly a paragraph long and difficult to parse, so I don't remember, other than the shock because if India was the jewel in Victoria's crown, San Domingue was the financial jewel that provided the French government a shockingly large amount of its income.  Benjamin Franklin was not sent to France by the Continental Congress in 1766 – there wasn’t a Continental Congress then, or even a movement for independence. That’s just a few mistakes within the history that I know very well.  What errors there are in the French history and biographies that I don’t know well, or not at all – we only guess.

Beyond that, the chronology is all over the place, which makes for a choppy text, as opposed to one that can be smoothly followed, as to who is who, when and where. This is particularly so as the narrative is supposedly about how this group of men, and the women they bedded, frequently even bedded at the same time, came to grief, their world destroyed, by the French Revolution, but we spend at least as much time in the era of King Louis XV, as we do with King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. It's not at all that the author should have left out the material from Louis XV's reign -- it's that as it is structured, it is hard to follow and gain the points the author's trying to make.

The most interesting section, because most vivid, with open spaces, as opposed to the claustrophobia of châteaux and palaces, was that of the Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur and his diplomatic service as ambassador to Catherine the Great. Their’s was the great spectacle of a journey across the wintery expanses of Russia to Tartarine Ukraine, and then the Crimea, which her general, lover, minister, friend, advisor, Potemkin, had recently conquered for her from the Turks. This is a landscape and action, of immense caravans of coaches for the court, coaches each as large and lavish as a small palace, surrounded by the 30,000 at least, cavalry and more infantry, more likely to be found in great historical fiction that real life – and make Cleopatra’s barges, and the journeys up the Nile, look small and a bit tawdry.

Finally, comes 1789.  Most of the personages described in The Libertines, survive, often just barely, prison and the Terror, and then Napoleon.  Some – do not.  None of them have the lives they led before the great change, this authentic, anti-monarchy and aristocratic revolution. For quite some time, some of them retained their privileged ignorance of what all those words were really saying and the actions really meant. For some time, many of them seemed to think the Revolution was staged particularly for their benefit and amusement – and under their direction, because, after all, that how things were always done.  Down with the King! Up with the ancient families!

Instead, they had to comfort themselves with writing their Memoirs and hoping they would sell well.