Academic literature on the topic 'Thermidorian Convention; French Revolution'

This article addresses Paine’s participation in the French Revolution, which has been largely either overlooked or caricatured by most scholars. It examines why the speeches he delivered and the writings he published in France during the various stages of the shift from monarchy to republic are significant and why they should not be merely considered as “a nice footnote to the politics of the Gironde” as Michael Walzer stated. My contention is that Paine’s contribution to the debates on republican institutions and on republican questions at key moments of the French Revolution after 1792 needs to be reappraised and is not marginal even if it has been marginalized. Paine’s viewpoint was seen as important by major agents of the Revolution either because it confirmed their own positions or because it contradicted them, which meant they had to defend these positions, as was the case in 1795 during the debate on the post-Thermidorian Constitution. Paine’s authority was used and exploited by his French political allies as well as by his French opponents. Paine’s republicanism is part of the history of the French Revolution and should be part of its historiography.

Who were the sans-culottes? What were their concerns and purposes? And what role did they play in the unfolding of events collectively known as the French Revolution? Michael Sonenscher first engaged directly with these questions in the 1980s (in an article for Social History 9 (1984), 303) when social historians were experimenting with the possibilities opened up by discourse analysis, and when the traditions of eighteenth-century civic, or republican, language seemed particularly exciting: The social history of the French Revolution owes much to the deepening insistence with which the discourse of the Revolution itself referred to, and postulated, necessary connections between everyday circumstances and public life. From Sieyes’ equation of aristocratic privilege with unproductive parasitism in 1788 to the Thermidorian caricature of the architects of the Terror as the dregs of society, the Revolution produced its own “social interpretation.” Sonenscher argued that while the identification of the figure of the sans-culotte with that of the artisan was “the achievement of the generation of historians—Richard Cobb, George Rudé and Albert Soboul—who reintroduced the popular movement into the historiography of the French Revolution”, there was always something problematic (or circular) in the underlying assumption that it was possible to equate the representation of artisan production found in the political language of the sans-culottes during the Revolution with what actually existed in the workshops of Paris or other towns of eighteenth-century France. Back in the 1980s what Sonenscher hoped was that a more accurate understanding of the actual dynamics of workshop production would produce “a better explanation of the meaning of the language of the sans-culottes”. His own expectation, as a social historian, was that the causality, in both explanatory and historical terms, would run from the social to the political sphere.

On 8 Brumaire, year II (29 October 1793), the Convention decreed that freedom of dress was a basic human right: ‘Everyone is free to wear whatever clothing and accessories of his sex that he finds pleasing.’ This was an odd decree in many ways. It decreed as a right something we take for granted, the freedom to wear what we choose, and it was passed during the Terror, when individual rights were routinely curtailed. It also contradicted itself, for if its first article guaranteed freedom of dress, its second stated that all previous laws on dress remained in force, and these included one which impinged on individual freedom: the requirement that all French citizens wear a red, white and blue cockade in public.

Abstract In the same years in which Jews were elected to the Dutch national assembly (the Batavian Convention), Jews on Curaçao were characterized in a letter received on the island in an unmistakably anti-Semitic way. The author was the prominent French official Victor Hugues, based in Guadeloupe. Two elders of the local Jewish community responded with a letter that shows a remarkable assertiveness, probably facilitated by the emancipation of Jews in the Dutch metropole. They reminded him of the principles of the French revolution, of which he was a servant. The letter, in the possession today of a private collector, is transcribed and translated here and provided with a context.

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carré and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified by the French National Convention in 1794. In what sense and by what right, then, were thousands of men, women, and children once again to be held to be “slaves”?

In the late 1840s, as revolutionswept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade.La Vendée: An Historical Romance(1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels.La Vendéeis one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position,La Vendéeis fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.

In the last decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Izmir experienced tremendous economic growth, mainly as a result of growth in the world economy. In addition, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the collapse of French economic domination in the area. As a result, Ottoman minority merchants experienced an equally tremendous economic growth (Frangakis-Syrett, 1987, pp. 73-86). Britain replaced France as the principal trading partner of Izmir, while the economic growth of the port-city as well as that of the minority merchants continued strong. It was in this period of increasing commercial activity that the Anglo-Turkish Convention was signed between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire on 16 August 1838 to come into effect in western Anatolia on March 1839. The Treaty, which subsequently was signed by all the European States as well as the United States and the Ottoman Empire, aimed at removing obstacles to free trade in the Empire for the merchants of these states. It was to achieve that by removing an array of local or additional duties paid for the export of Ottoman goods or the import and circulation of all other goods, manufactured or otherwise, and by setting a fixed rate of five percent duty on imports and twelve percent on exports—nine percent on purchasing at the place of growth and three percent on exportation.

Notion of constitutional concept varies over time and space. Constitution for Europe as a further step in guaranteeing rights and separating powers. Amongst others French, Italian, German and Swedish national concepts in the Treaties of the European Communities and of the European Union. Several causes for difficult tracing of national concepts in the Constitution for Europe. Convention method: instead of by diplomats and EU experts, drafting by members of Parliament and (former) members of Government. More room for national concepts. The Intergovernmental Conference: the Empire strikes back, but with mixed impact. Parallels with other constitution making procedures. Concept of constitution: structure and size no argument for denying constitutional character; Constitution octroyée v. contrat social; Franco-American revolution v. British tradition.

Florian contribuyó en mayor medida que cualquier otro traductor a la gloriosa fortuna de Cervantes en Francia. Es fundamental lo pastoril/campesino en Florian. Una corriente de la crítica actual afirma que la gran boga del género durante los primeros años de la Revolución no representa el deseado regreso del Antiguo Régimen que se ha supuesto, sino que miran los autores –asustados pero esperanzados- hacia un futuro constituido por lo mejor tanto del pasado como del futuro. Así nos encontramos en Florian ante un curioso revolucionario. Abundan los pasajes que reducen las alusiones a las proezas violentas de los caballeros como los que ensanchan la atención dedicada a las actividades amorosas. En el retrato que se ofrece de la mente femenina, representada por la Marcela cervantina, la idea principal de su auto-defensa no es ninguna rebelión contra las expectativas masculinas, sino una reivindicación como pastora autónoma de los derechos humanos de todos y todas proclamados por la Revolución Francesa. Para Florian, los fingidos pastores y pastoras no representaban tanto una lírica convención literaria como unos modélicos portadores de valores fundamentales de una sociedad en procelosa travesía.PALABRAS CLAVELa revolución filosófica del XVIII, idealización francesa de Cervantes, valores aristocráticos y campesinos, los derechos de las mujeres. Florian, more than any other translator, contributed to the glorius reputation of Cervantes in France. In Florian´s thinking there is a basic pastoral and peasant element in the Revolution. A current within present historical criticism maintains that the great popularity of this genre then does not represent a longed-for return of the Old Regime, as has been assumed, but rather that authors –frightened but hopeful- looked forward to a future grounded in the best of both a nostalgic past as well as an optimistic view of the future. From this perspective we find Florian today to be a surprising revolutionary. There are abundant passages that cut back references to knights’ violent deeds. Similarly, in the portrait offered of the feminine mind, represented by Cervantes’ Marcela, the main tenant of her self-defense is not any rebellion against male expectations, but rather the assertion by an autonomous shepherdess of the human rights of everyone, men and women, proclaimed by the French Revolution. For Florian, these feigned shepherds and shepherdesses do not represent so much a lyrical literary convention as worthy representatives of the basic values of a society that finds itself adrift on a stormy crossing.KEY WORDSThe 18th-century philosophical revolution, French idealization of Cervantes, aristocratic and peasant values, women’s rights.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

Nous abordons par le biais de ce journal un chapitre de la pensée réactionnaire en France après la Révolution – précisément en 1795 –, chapitre constitué par un journal favorable à la monarchie, à savoir La Quotidienne. Si le titre de notre thèse se focalise sur la Convention thermidorienne, le corpus de notre recherche comprend également le mois de décembre 1796, sous le Directoire, ce qui nous permet de mesurer l’évolution du journal entre ces deux systèmes politiques. Nous nous intéressons principalement à la littérature publiée dans La Quotidienne, sous des formes et des genres variés (poésie, dialogues, théâtre…), non sans avoir d’abord examiné le contexte de la publication : l’histoire politique de la Convention thermidorienne et la renaissance, timide et mesurée, de la liberté de la presse après le 9 Thermidor. Entre ces deux volets de notre recherche, nous proposons une description matérielle du journal (forme des articles, structuration en rubriques, souscription, etc.)Nous avons lu La Quotidienne d’un œil curieux et aussi objectif que possible ; mais surtout avec plaisir : notre intérêt pour ce journal est en effet né d’une double passion pour la littérature et pour la presse. Nous souhaitons que les lecteurs de cette recherche puissent éprouver le même intérêt pour un journal quelque peu oublié quant à sa période révolutionnaire, mais qui est un petit théâtre où se jouent en direct et de façon originale, les grands enjeux idéologiques de la période
Our purpose throughout this research on La Quotidienne, a Parisian daily newspaper, is to deal with an aspect of reactionary thought in France at the end of the Revolution, in 1795 to be precise. Even though the title of this thesis focuses on the Thermidorian Convention, our research includes December 1796 issues, published therefore under the Directory rule. This allows us to consider the evolution of this paper between two political systems.Our thesis mostly focuses on the different genres and forms of literature published in La Quotidienne (poetry, dialogues, theatre…). It was however necessary to first consider the general context of publication: the political history of the Thermidorian Convention, as well as the timid and careful rebirth of press freedom after the 9th Thermidor. Between these two parts, we provide a material description of the newspaper (headings, articles, sections, subscription, etc.)We have read La Quotidienne with curiosity and as objectively as possible; but also with a pleasure derived from our strong attachment to literature and the press. We wish to convey some of this pleasure to our readers, when they discover this somewhat neglected newspaper – a small stage where the main ideas of the time are at play

Dans un système constitutionnel fondé sur la souveraineté de la nation, le pouvoir constituant fait figure de phénomène ambivalent, difficilement analysable en termes juridiques. Par définition réfractaire à tout encadrement impératif, le pouvoir suprême au sein de l’Etat n’en doit pas moins revêtir une forme organisée pour exprimer une volonté normative. Les acteurs de la Révolution française agissent aux confins du droit, tirant profit des ressources de la philosophie politique et de l’histoire pour établir une constitution, principe fondamental du système juridique qu’ils cherchent à établir. Ils se dotent d’outils pour parvenir à leurs fins : le concept de « convention nationale » en est un, auréolé du succès des réalisations américaines. Plutôt qu’à une transposition institutionnelle, les révolutionnaires français procèdent à une adaptation. En devenant « extraordinaire », la représentation constituante qu’ils conceptualisent perd son caractère révolutionnaire pour devenir pleinement juridique. Elle offre une alternative à l’insurrection. Un tel processus présente cependant un revers. Ce pouvoir, en accédant à l’existence investi de l’exercice de la souveraineté, est dégagé de toutes contraintes juridiques autres que celles qui découlent de son organisation. Ces contraintes pèsent sur ses membres, exacerbant les tensions qui déchirent un corps collectif doté des pouvoirs les plus étendus. Les dérives sanglantes qui frappent la Convention nationale ne sont pas inéluctables ; elles découlent de l’exploitation politique des failles inhérentes au fonctionnement d’une représentation souveraine dont les membres ne doivent jouir d’aucun privilège
In a constitutional system founded on the sovereignty of the nation, constituent power is an ambivalent phenomenon, difficult to analyse in juridical terms. By definition resistant to mandatory regulation, the supreme power in the state must necessarily take a form which enables it to express a normative will. The actors of the French Revolution push the confines of the law, taking advantage of the resources of political philosophy and history to establish a constitution, fundamental principle of the juridical system they seek to institute. They create tools to achieve their ends: the concept of “national convention” being one, taking inspiration from the success of American achievements. Rather than an institutionnal transposition, the French revolutionaries proceed with an adaptation. By becoming “extraordinary”, the constituent representation which they conceptualize losses its revolutionary character to become fully juridical. It offers an alternative to the insurrection. By coming into existence invested with the capacity to exercise sovereignty, this power is released from all legal constraints other than those arising as a result of its organization. The process, however, is two-sided, and internally produced constraints weigh on its members, exacerbating tensions thar tear a collective body endowed with the broadest powers. The bloody excesses that strike the National Convention are not inevitable. They arise from political exploitation of flaws inherent to the organization of a sovereign representation whose members must not have any privilege

Dans un système constitutionnel fondé sur la souveraineté de la nation, le pouvoir constituant fait figure de phénomène ambivalent, difficilement analysable en termes juridiques. Par définition réfractaire à tout encadrement impératif, le pouvoir suprême au sein de l’Etat n’en doit pas moins revêtir une forme organisée pour exprimer une volonté normative. Les acteurs de la Révolution française agissent aux confins du droit, tirant profit des ressources de la philosophie politique et de l’histoire pour établir une constitution, principe fondamental du système juridique qu’ils cherchent à établir. Ils se dotent d’outils pour parvenir à leurs fins : le concept de « convention nationale » en est un, auréolé du succès des réalisations américaines. Plutôt qu’à une transposition institutionnelle, les révolutionnaires français procèdent à une adaptation. En devenant « extraordinaire », la représentation constituante qu’ils conceptualisent perd son caractère révolutionnaire pour devenir pleinement juridique. Elle offre une alternative à l’insurrection. Un tel processus présente cependant un revers. Ce pouvoir, en accédant à l’existence investi de l’exercice de la souveraineté, est dégagé de toutes contraintes juridiques autres que celles qui découlent de son organisation. Ces contraintes pèsent sur ses membres, exacerbant les tensions qui déchirent un corps collectif doté des pouvoirs les plus étendus. Les dérives sanglantes qui frappent la Convention nationale ne sont pas inéluctables ; elles découlent de l’exploitation politique des failles inhérentes au fonctionnement d’une représentation souveraine dont les membres ne doivent jouir d’aucun privilège
In a constitutional system founded on the sovereignty of the nation, constituent power is an ambivalent phenomenon, difficult to analyse in juridical terms. By definition resistant to mandatory regulation, the supreme power in the state must necessarily take a form which enables it to express a normative will. The actors of the French Revolution push the confines of the law, taking advantage of the resources of political philosophy and history to establish a constitution, fundamental principle of the juridical system they seek to institute. They create tools to achieve their ends: the concept of “national convention” being one, taking inspiration from the success of American achievements. Rather than an institutionnal transposition, the French revolutionaries proceed with an adaptation. By becoming “extraordinary”, the constituent representation which they conceptualize losses its revolutionary character to become fully juridical. It offers an alternative to the insurrection. By coming into existence invested with the capacity to exercise sovereignty, this power is released from all legal constraints other than those arising as a result of its organization. The process, however, is two-sided, and internally produced constraints weigh on its members, exacerbating tensions thar tear a collective body endowed with the broadest powers. The bloody excesses that strike the National Convention are not inevitable. They arise from political exploitation of flaws inherent to the organization of a sovereign representation whose members must not have any privilege

From its initial appearance in 1694 and through successive editions in 1718, 1740, and 1762, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française had risen to become the definitive arbiter of the French language. Preparation of the fifth edition was at an advanced state when the French Revolution began in 1789 but it remained unfinished when the National Convention suppressed academies in August 1793. Seeking to codify the language of the Revolution, the Convention commissioned two Parisian publishers to complete the fifth edition, hoping that it would be a vehicle for promoting the ideals of the Revolution in the manner that the earlier editions had for the values of absolute monarchy. When it appeared during the year VI (1798), however, it was completely anachronistic and barely took note of the Revolution except for a brief supplement of “words in use since the Revolution” that comprised only a small fraction of its content. Another Parisian publisher believed its deficiencies offered an opportunity to publish a competing edition, which he did, along with a partner, in 1802. The holders of the rights to the fifth edition took them to court for piracy, initiating protracted legislation in which they ultimately prevailed. Preparation of the sixth edition had been entrusted to the Institut National and the Napoleonic regime was eager to see it completed, but Bonaparte fell before that occurred. The restored Bourbon dynasty was also eager to see the new edition completed but it was overthrown in 1830. The sixth edition appeared only in 1835 and, similar to the fifth edition it supplanted, it glossed over the Revolution—as well as the Napoleonic period—but in a different manner. Although the dictionary included definitions from the revolutionary and Napoleonic era, it frequently elided the period through the phrase “at a certain epoch.”

Maradan quickly withdrew from the project, and years later than the stipulated deadline, Smits published the fifth edition, although the work was rushed into print when key figures working on it were proscribed after the coup of fructidor. The Convention had hoped that the dictionary would disseminate the values of the Revolution in the same manner as the earlier edition had for the ideals of absolute monarchy. The fifth edition, however, was filled with anachronistic ideas and suppressed institutions and barely took note of the Revolution, not even mentioning the French Revolution in its list of examples of revolutions. The sole acknowledgment was a brief and utterly inadequate supplement of new words in use since the Revolution, which at only 418 words was a fraction of the dictionary’s content. To the degree that it failed to capture the current state of language, the fifth edition was widely regarded as deficient.