On Ne Peux Pas Depasser L'Horreur De la Bourgeoisie

[poliphilo]

French provincial towns are the stuffiest, most stultifying provincial towns in the world.

Or so one would gather from a crash course in French literature and cinema.

The one word- bourgeois- says it all. We don't have an English equivalent.

I just watched Chabrol's Les Noces Rouges. God, but these people are dim; they commit two unnecessary murders because they can't imagine moving out of the ugly little town that accords them status.

We English have a different attitude. Cranford, Middlemarch, Barchester are well-loved places; quite lively really; no-one is stifled by them the way Emma Bovary is stifled.

I put it down to France being such a big country. English towns are all squashed up close together; escape is easier. French towns are cut off from one another by miles and miles of prairie.

Physical isolation breeds cultural isolation.

No English town is as deaf and blind to London as any French town is deaf and blind to Paris.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

This stuff is fiction, you know, it isn't obliged to give you a balanced viewpoint.

France is about double the size of Britain, so although it is - still - a more rural country, there aren't the miles of prairie that separate American small towns (about which I know only from books, so let's not start making comparisons).

And it's true that - perhaps because France became a single unity later than England did - the provincial cities are more independent of the capital. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

As for Emma Bovary, she was a very silly woman, and deluded herself that she was bored because of where she lived, when in fact she was bored because she was boring (Charles, on the other hand, deserved better).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

"it isn't obliged to give you a balanced viewpoint"

Mais oui. The French provinces may be overflowing with culture and magnanimity for all I know. It's just that French artists don't seem to think so.

I find this interesting.