The new face of Gallica

Gallica, the on-line French national library, has been offering digitized books on-line long before Google Books did. It was astonishing to me what I could find there, but the site tended to be somewhat quirky. (At one point I was under the impression that the downloads were not available on the weekends.) And it was always entirely in French. Now they have a new, slick interface and an English version: I'm amazed. I had read some time back that they protested Google Books, and perhaps this overhaul is their way of getting a competitive edge. Whatever the reason: bravo!

The Hour of our Death

I have a number of new research books, and a few nights ago I began reading The Hour of Our Death; the Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years by Philippe Ariès. [Trans. From the French by Helen Weaver. Barnes & Noble; New York; 1981] Immediately I got up to look for a highlighter and pencil. This book is going to be fruitful.

One thing I found of interest was this statement:

“People lost consciousness frequently in those days, and even rough warriors, fearless and brave, swooned on every occasion. This emotional susceptibility on the part of men lasted until the baroque period. It was not until the seventeenth century that it became important for the male to master his emotions.” (page 6)

However, I’ve noticed that even in the baroque and even into the late 18th century, men were a lot more emotional than we’re accustomed to seeing them today. Louis XIV wept publically on a number of occassions. Politicians in debates during the French Revolution would break into tears (while declaiming that women were too emotional to vote).

Why was it different then? Why has it changed today? It’s a subject that puzzles me.

One simplistic theory I have is that history progresses as a human being progresses. The Middle Ages, for example, strike me as child-like. There was little self-consciousness about nudity, for example, in the way that very young children can be indifferent. Sometimes the way people acted during the baroque period reminds me of Grade Nine: cliques, petty squabbles. I want to say, “Oh, grow up!” The Napoleonic Era is more like a twenty-year-old, passionate and self-righteous.

And, given all that, what are we now?

Beliefs: that the dead are always present, but that they are only visible to those about to die. (page 7)

I find this sweet and comforting.

Signals of death:
The tolling of a bell that rang all by itself.
Three knocks on the floor.

Then, as now, there was a difference between what the literati believed, and the beliefs of the common people.

Unlike today, where we take great pains to deny that death is imminent, in the past it was considered important for someone to know that he or she was about to die. Sometimes a warning or premonition was taken to an extreme, and the dying person would hasten to arrange a funeral, have the house draped in black, Masses said ahead. And then die on the day and at the hour indicated! (page 9)

Unlike today, to avoid death’s warning was to make oneself ridiculous.

It was considered natural for Death to announce his arrival, so Death should not be sudden: mors repentina. If there was no warning, the natural order of things had been violated (and perhaps considered the wrath of God). Therefore, a sudden death was regarded as shameful. “A vile and ugly death.” Frightening, “a strange and monstrous thing that nobody dared talk about.” There was even debate about whether someone dying alone and suddenly should even be buried in a cemetery.

Another twist: if killed by a criminal: the victim was dishonored, compared to someone who died while committing adultery or playing a pagan game (i.e. any game other than a knightly tournament). The victims of a murder might receive a Christian burial, but would be fined. Even King Henri IV, who died as a result of a knife attack, was not exempt:

“In their funeral orations for Henri IV, preachers felt obliged to exonerate the king from the ignominious circumstances of his death under Ravaillac’s knife.” [page 12]

This is a long, detailed book, and endlessly fascinating. I'll be with it for some time.

Top ten research sites

I'm pleased to be a guest blogger on Madam Mayo today, listing my five top historical research sites, and why.

Sun King's fictional diaries mistaken for real

According to an article in the Guardian today (see link below), biographer Veronica Buckley, in her book Madame de Maintenon: The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, quotes from French historian François Bluche’s Le Journal Secret de Louis XIV throughout, assuming that the journals are real. They are not, and although at first I read them with the excitement of discovery, it didn’t take me long to deduce that they had to be fiction, so I’m surprised by her costly and embarrassing error. Buckley is the author of Christina, Queen of Sweden, a respected biography, and I can only imagine how painful this must be.

However, to be fair, she’s not the only one. I’ve read an academic thesis that cited Le Journal Secret as a primary source. Even so, how could this have happened — especially given that Le Journal Secret has tell-tale factual errors? Was Buckley’s work not being checked by historians?

I’d like raise yet another question: how could Bluche himself have made so many errors? He is prominent in the field, a respected historian. My suspicion is that he didn’t have his usual army of fact-checkers for a work of fiction. To give only one example, he claims that the King is present at a wedding on April 15, 1661. The bride in question had left Paris two days before, having been married on the 10th. Because I record facts to a detailed timeline, I caught a number of errors with respect to dates in the work: a wrong day here, a wrong month there, even, in one instance, a wrong year.

For more on this, see Helen Pidd’s article in The Guardian, “Find of Sun King’s secret diaries sounded almost too good to be true. And it was …”

Elizabeth, the movie

We went to see Elizabeth last night, and we are glad we did. We may even buy the DVD, to have it at home to watch again. The costuming was spectacular, Cate Blanchett brilliant, the settings and photography fantastic. The script was rarely banal and had some nice subtle touches. But...

But as a researcher into history I had quibbles, the greatest being the portrayal of the Protestants as embracers of individualism and light, and Catholics as in the Dark Ages. They had to delineate the good and the bad in true Hollywood fashion, and the movie is, after all, the story of the war of Catholic Spain against Protestant England, and of course Protestant Elizabeth is the movie's heroine. But my personal impression is that the Protestants were the extremists: no dancing, no festivals, even the celebration of Christmas was outlawed for a time. No frivolity whatsoever. Clothing had to be sober, and in dark colours. Everything so serious. In a Protestant church, the women sat separate from the men and the ministers preached covered.

So that's my main quibble, making Catholics out to be so terribly cult-like and evil. Another is that the men and women were so often alone: this would have been highly unlikely. The scene of Elizabeth and Sir Walter sitting on the floor together drinking wine was hard to believe. I think proprieties would have been observed. Also, was it true that the men picked the women up from the crotch in dancing? Minor things: no bonnet at bedtime. Men jumping overboard to save their lives: surely they would have been jumping to a certain death. Etc. etc. etc.

But other than that, a wonderful movie — a wonderful Hollywood movie.

Excellent videos on Versailles

The website for Versailles now offers excellent short videos on-line — called podcasts — in both English and French.

More on (historical) fact and fiction

I really liked this blog post: Fiction Versus History: Which is most truthful?

To quote:

What turns me off from traditional historical writing is the distance from which the story is told. When I pick up a book on a historical figure, I want that book to take me into the head space and emotional state of the person I’m reading about. Unfortunately most history books are unable to do that. They are told from the view point of the observer or researcher. And despite the historian’s best efforts to give the protagonist a personality, it always seems to fall short of what the real person must’ve been.

My alternative to history books has become historical fiction. They provide the depth and complexity of character that I crave as a reader and the historical background that I appreciate learning about.

Discovering the past is my main motivation for writing historical fiction. Research sparks me, but it’s only through delving deeply into the day-to-day lives of my characters that I even begin to understand.