by Judy Jones
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926–1984): Velvet fist in an iron glove. Tended to ask, but usually didn’t stick around to answer, the bravest, vaguest, and thorniest kinds of questions: What are the “discourses” that inform, say, our attitudes toward sexuality or our treatment of the insane? How do the “discourses” emerge? What rules do they obey? How and why do they change? Foucault, who has been claimed by both the structuralists and the poststructuralists and who described himself as a “historian of systems of thought,” kept two generations of Parisian Marxists and American graduate students guessing as to what the correct answers were, without himself ever being pinned down—like a particularly outrageous drag queen (as one insider’s simile has it) foiling the arrest attempts of a whole squad of policemen. While it seems clear that Foucault never did a whole lot of library research into madness, sexuality, prison, hospitals, or anything else, and while some of his insights seem like plain showing off, you’ll want to pay attention to his notion of the episteme—from the Greek word for “knowledge,” a sharp break between one historical period and another, marked by the end of one intellectual framework and the beginning of a new one, as when the Age of Reason, reviewing the differences between what was normal and what wasn’t, decided to reclass the insane (who in the Middle Ages had been thought of as divinely inspired), this time behind bars. Ditto to his belief (heartfelt, incidentally) that the subtlest problem in the world, and the one most worth studying, is the relationship between liberty and social coercion, or, stated the way Foucault used to state it, between truth and power.
Fun Couples
JUSTINIAN AND THEODORA (married A.D. 525): The team that made the Byzantine Empire what it isn’t today. A couple of climbers (he came from peasant stock and worked his way up to the throne; she was the daughter of a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome), they’re a classic example of what the right woman can do for a man. Justinian had energy (he was the one about whom it was first said “The emperor never sleeps”), personal appeal, and a knack for recognizing talent when he saw it. He was, however, an unstable egomaniac and an intellectual lightweight. Theodora was a troublemaker, but she had the requisite brains and nerve to keep Justinian in the imperial driver’s seat. While she was alive, he consolidated the empire, drove out pesky barbarians, established the famous Justinian Code, and initiated most of the architectural feats associated with Byzantine glory. After she died (of cancer, in 548), he spent the rest of his reign tinkering.
HELOISE AND ABELARD (married c. 1118): What a tear-jerker! Peter Abelard was the most celebrated logician, theologian, and teacher of his day, and the biggest ego in medieval France. Taking a shine to young Heloise, the brilliant seventeen-year-old niece of a canon at the university, he finagled a job as her tutor and promptly seduced her. After she gave birth to a son named Astrolabe (don’t look at us, we weren’t consulted), the couple were married, but secretly, to avoid damaging Abelard’s career. Heloise went home to live with her uncle, who became increasingly freaked out over the whole affair. He took to slapping Heloise around on general principle, and finally hired a couple of thugs to sneak into Abelard’s room at night and castrate him. This hurt Abelard’s pride. He crept off to become a famous teacher somewhere else, write controversial scholarly treatises, and establish an order of literary nuns, of which Heloise eventually became the abbess. Poor Heloise, who was forced to take the veil, never got to spend more than five minutes with her husband after that fateful night in Paris, but she and Abelard did publish the love letters that substituted for sex for the rest of their lives; centuries later, these inspired the epistolary novel, if that’s any consolation.
HENRY II AND ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE (married 1152): Not only did they form the most potent concentration of forces in feudal Europe, but their relationship contained enough sex, power, and ambition to fuel a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie. Eleanor was thirty, Henry nineteen when they met. She saw in him a lusty young adventurer, the future King of England. He saw in her the chance for a brilliant political alliance (England was no prize in those days and she did happen to own—personally—more than half of France). Two towering egos, they spent the next twenty years intimidating the neighbors and trying to dominate each other. He turned England into a respectable kingdom; she ran Aquitaine. He fought the Church; she patronized the arts. He ran around with other women; she sponsored young troubadors. Finally, she talked her sons into making war on their father; he won and had her thrown in jail for fifteen years. She had the last laugh, though; she outlived him.
FERDINAND AND ISABELLA (married 1469): It was a Catholic ceremony. The bride, Isabella of Castile, was the product of a Gothic-novel childhood— gloomy castle, demented mother, sexually depraved half-brother and all—but she didn’t let that stand in her way when the throne of Castile was up for grabs. The groom, Ferdinand of Aragon, was dashing, dynamic, and due to inherit the province next door, plus Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, and the Balearic Islands. They were a perfect match, a couple of high-stakes players sitting on a lot of undeveloped real estate. To tame the local nobles and instill a sense of family loyalty, the couple decided to start the Spanish Inquisition. This, combined with the expulsion of the Jews and Moors, the conquest of Grenada, and the high returns on Isabella’s investment in Christopher Columbus (with whom she was almost certainly not having an affair), did the trick. Spain became the most fearsomely Catholic country in the world and the most ironclad monarchy in Europe, and Ferdinand and Isabella, “the Catholic kings,” became the best argument for or against marrying within your own faith, depending on your point of view.
WILLIAM AND MARY (married 1677): Now here’s a boring couple. Paragons of Protestant restraint, they nevertheless managed to undermine the whole concept of absolute monarchy. William (that’s William of Orange) was a stolid, sensible Dutchman; fatherless, childless, humorless, and utterly devoid of table manners, he seemed incapable of any passion except a rabid hatred of the French. He was imported by the English Parliament to unseat Mary’s father, the Catholic James II, which he did in a bloodless victory of political maneuvering over divine right known as the Glorious Revolution. Thanks in part to the obedient Mary, who was merely William’s safe-conduct to the English throne, Parliament gained supremacy over the crown, England became securely Protestant again, and William, who didn’t care a fig for the crown, for England, or for Mary, got to pursue his impossible dream: eliminating all things French from the face of the earth.
NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE (married 1796): An unlikely match, but it seemed to work. He was a short Corsican soldier six years her junior with minimal connections, few social graces, and no money in the bank. She was a seductive Creole from Martinique with two children, expensive tastes, and one of the most fashionable salons in Paris. His family loathed her. She wasn’t impressed with him, either, but her politically prominent lover encouraged the match. Two days after the wedding he marched off to conquer Italy. She stayed home, shopped, and had affairs with younger men. He put up with her infidelities and her laziness and found comfort in the vast empty spaces of her mind. She put up with his rages and his round-the-clock workdays and worshipped him from across the room. For thirteen years they lived happily in the fast lane. He conquered most of Europe, rearranged the rest, and had himself crowned emperor. She took to wearing Empire-waist dresses and bought more hats. He never did manage to get her pregnant, though, and in the end he annulled the marriage to hitch up with an eighteen-year-old Austrian princess who bore him an heir. Too bad; it broke Josephine’s heart and, as it turned out, he needn’t have bothered.
FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (married 1905): The closest we ever had to a king and a queen. Or to a pair of kings, but let’s leave Eleanor’s sexual preferences out of this, shall we? FDR did have a dictatorial streak, what with the New Deal, the way he tried to butt into the Supreme Court’s business, and his getting us into the war. But don’t forget that demagoguery was in flower in those days and it could’ve been worse: We could’ve had Huey Long. Besides, Fran
klin gave us Eleanor, who was a great lady in spite of those sensible shoes. Not content with planting memorial shrubs, she was even more of a reformer than he was; in fact, some people called her a Communist—an understandable mistake, given her holier-than-thou attitudes and the fact that she didn’t see anything intrinsically wrong with “Negroes.” This was more a partnership than a marriage, really, and sometimes it seemed more like a rivalry than either. But isn’t that, after all, the American Way?
MAO ZEDONG AND JIANG QING (married c. 1938, if ever). They showed the West that Chinese Communists can have marital problems, too. He was already on his third wife when he met her; she was an ambitious Shanghai actress who’d been through one husband and several, well, mentors. For nearly thirty years she had to be content with typing his lecture notes and occasionally outraging his comrades by daring to appear in public as Madame Mao. Then, in 1966, she suddenly emerged as first deputy leader and chief witch-hunter of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. For the next ten years she publicly purged bourgeois reactionism from the arts while privately screening Greta Garbo movies for her friends. Mao, who lived (and, more particularly, slept) elsewhere, kept in touch by sending her cryptic notes and right-thinking poems. Almost immediately after his death in 1976, she was arrested as one of the “Gang of Four,” charged, in a show trial, with plotting to become “the new empress,” and expelled from the Party as a “bourgeois careerist, conspirator, counterrevolutionary, double-dealer, and renegade.” Her famous retort: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. When he said ‘Bite,’ I bit.” She spent the next fourteen years in a Chinese jail, where, according to the official version, she hanged herself from her bedframe in 1991.
Vintage Years
1453
The Hundred Years’ War (actually the Hundred and Sixteen Years’ War, but who’s counting?), between England and France, is over. So are: chivalry (the armor couldn’t stand up to the new English longbow, plus most of the knights had come to seem more greedy than valiant); Joan of Arc (burned at the stake, but she really had singlehandedly saved France); and the illusion that England, the loser, sort of, and France, the winner, sort of (even though the former, an underpopulated little island, had, in the course of the war, managed to win possession of most of the latter, the biggest, fattest country in Europe, only to be routed at the end) were destined to be a single nation. By war’s end, too, kings are firmly back in the saddle after two centuries of cagey maneuvering on the part of the nobility and its parliaments (and of their own royal ineptitude). And the Middle Ages are teetering on the brink of Modern Times.
Joan of Arc at Prayer by Rubens
1598
Henry IV of France issues the Edict of Nantes, promising French Protestants, or Huguenots, the same civil and religious rights that French Catholics had. Unlike England, where the Catholic minority had no rights at all, and Germany, where religion was all about grabbing a free city or a principality and imposing your own creed on it, France was suddenly, and out of the blue, behaving like a grownup. For this, there is Henry to thank, a former Huguenot (and a particularly savvy one), who, having been crowned king, realized that if he wanted to be let inside the gates of heavily Catholic Paris, he was going to have to make a few concessions—the occasion for his religious conversion and for his famous observation, “Paris is well worth a Mass.” Make a note of Henry IV (born Henry of Navarre): He’s the most popular and most fondly remembered of all the French kings (except maybe for St. Louis, back in the Middle Ages), he was the first politician ever to make use of the slogan “a chicken in every pot,” and he was the founder of the Bourbon dynasty, laying the foundations for the absolutism of the Louis who followed him. Unfortunately, Henry was assassinated in 1610; the Huguenots would get theirs, too, in 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and France started to pretend it had never even heard of religious tolerance.
The Peace of Westphalia
1648
The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War, the most destructive war yet. Wave good-bye to the medieval worldview, the Counter-Reformation, wars of religion, the Holy Roman Empire, Germany’s prospects for the next two hundred years, and Spain’s prospects, period. Brace yourself for the triumph of secular thinking, the ascendancy of France (in the person of Louis XIV), and a new age of pluralism, in which nobody will even pretend Europe has any overriding unity, spiritual, political, or other, and in which states will behave like the discrete, self-interested entities they are.
1762
Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes his Social Contract. His glorification of the common man, the “noble savage,” had already managed to make breast-feeding fashionable again (and would later encourage Marie Antoinette to dress up as a milkmaid). Now Rousseau, feeling alienated as ever—he was Swiss, Protestant, and paranoid, among other things, and nobody wanted to play milkmaid with him—describes a society in which he thinks men, himself included, could be happy: Individuals would surrender their natural liberty to one another, fusing their individual wills into a General Will, which, rather than a king or even a parliament, would be the true sovereign power. With his Social Contract, Rousseau becomes the prophet of both democracy and nationalism; in just a few years, the ideas he set forth in it will help to bring about the French Revolution. The book is not, however, a bestseller.
Rousseau, center, ventures into society
1815
The Congress of Vienna puts its stamp on Europe. The four great powers— England, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—having finally managed to write finis to Napoleon’s plan for a France that stretched from Madrid to Moscow, now sit down and work out a “balance of power” that will pretty much prevail until the First World War. Not that the diplomats who gathered in Austria’s capital—the shifty Prince Metternich, the crafty Baron Talleyrand, and so on—were all that forward-looking; in fact, most of them, intent on squashing the liberalism and nationalism and democracy that had sprouted in the aftermath of the French Revolution, were downright reactionary. But neither were the diplomats dopes: The Treaty of Vienna wisely let France off fairly easy (applause here for Talleyrand, who knew an opening when he saw one), deeded over to Britain the best and the brightest colonial empire, smoothed over the rivalry between Prussia and Austria for domination of the German-speaking world, and resolved the issue (for at least the next couple of generations) of who’d push Poland around. And, for a hundred years after the incredible (and exhausting) brouhaha of the French Revolution and Napoleon, there was—if you leave aside the insurrections of 1830 and 1848 (see below) and a few eensy localized conflicts like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—peace.
The Paris barricades, 1848
1848
Barricades and cobblestones, radicalism and the June Days. All over Europe—Paris to Budapest, Copenhagen to Palermo—the existing order is challenged, and sometimes overturned, only to be back still pretty much on top a few months later. (Britain and Russia alone missed out on the chaos.) The issues: nationalism, constitutional government, broadened suffrage, the abolition of serfdom in the Balkans. The enemy: the ruling classes, the Catholic Church, the farflung Hapsburg influence. The result: a basic misfiring—serfs are freed, all right, but dreams of liberalism and good government bite the dust. The legacy: class hatred and national jealousy, a new toughness of mind (which the Germans, whose day is at hand, will call Realpolitik), and the setting of the stage for Marxism. In fact, The Communist Manifesto had appeared that January.
1854
Commodore Perry, an American, opens Japan. He finds there an elaborately civilized nation, much given to city life, novels, the theater, the contemplation of landscape, lacquer work, and fans. None of which stops him from threatening to open fire if the Japanese don’t accede to his demands to trade with America, and on terms hugely advantageous to the latter. Ditto, to trade with everybody else in a gunboat and a cocked hat. Japan, sealed off tight little-island-style from the rest of the world since 1640, when it had kicked out all of an earlier gener
ation of Europeans except for a handful of Dutch merchants in Nagasaki, will soon find itself undergoing Westernization in everything from the codification of its laws to the delivery of its mail. The Japanese wind up getting what they soon realize they’d really been needing all along—science, technology, bureaucracy. And they get it real fast. In fact, never have so many people undergone so profound a transformation in so few years. Or, a short century later, so succeeded in upstaging their teachers.
1945
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin take another meeting, this one at Yalta, an old czarist summer resort on the Black Sea. Victory over Germany and Japan is in sight: But how are the Allied powers to deal with the defeated? Likewise, each other? Roosevelt miscalculates, choosing to trust Stalin too much, listen to Churchill—a past master at the old spheres-of-influence, keep-your-distance style of diplomacy—too little. Russia not only gets most of Eastern Europe (not that it doesn’t have one big furry boot on it already) plus parts of Japan (who it hasn’t even been at war with), it gets the West’s seal of approval, too. And all in the name of, talk about irony, international friendship.
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta
Louis, Louis
It’s hard enough trying to keep track of the English Henrys and Richards; what is one to do with the crazy French monarchs who, for centuries, insisted on naming their eldest sons Louis? Our advice: Start small. Here, the four Louises to remember, and a few things to remember them by. THE MAN: LOUIS XIII (1601-1643)
