"Madame de Pompadour" by Francois Boucher (photo: Yelkrokoyade) |
“Apres nous, le deluge” is the quote attributed to Madame de
Pompadour, the lover of Louis XV. The expression has also been attributed to
Louis himself with the syntax slightly changed to “Apres moi, le deluge.” The
old imperial moi? In any case, Louis was right since the winds of revolution
were plainly in the air. Actually, there were revolutions in both America and
France auguring the beginning of meritocratic societies which eventually
overturned a pre-existing aristocratic order. Both Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) and Edmund
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France offered the prospect of viewing the evolution of American society
through the looking glass of countervailing cultures which were still struggling
to counterbalance the old and the new, with both authors being proxies for what
might be called an enlightened conservatism. England became a unique example in
that it maintained its hereditary aristocracy while allowing a more egalitarian
and democratic society to develop. The latest go round of American populism
under the auspice of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon is coming a little late to
the party to the extent that it’s a revolution that’s actually been
orchestrated by an elite. The psychoanalytic term après coup refers to the
latent response to a (usually childhood) trauma. It would be interesting to
speculate on the collective trauma that
might have caused the current perversion of the notion of popular uprising being perpetrated on the American people by the Trumpocracy. Let's not forget that Madame de Pompadour was a high class whore.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.