Rudra's New Writeups

The Third Estate (thing)

2005-01-27T21:23:22Z

By 1789, many people in France had come to view the Third Estate or the Tiers-Etat as including everyone who was not a clergyman or noble. In 1789, the Estates-General had not been called for 175 years. The specifics of the Third Estate's compostion had been forgotten, and came to be viewed as "everyone else." But in statutes, the Third Estate actually only represented the bourgeois of the "seigneurial towns," that is, towns which had been chartered to be freed of the local lord. In the royal demesne, the king held the lordship of such towns. In cities located in the domaines of great lords of the realm, the city itself became its own lord and was the direct vassal of the king, thus making it an independent island inside another lord's territory. The peasantry (the vast majority of the population) were not intended to be represented at all.

Past Anterior (thing)

2005-01-19T18:40:16Z

The past anterior or passÃ© antÃ©rieur is a literary tense that is not much used in French nowadays. The form of the past anterior is much like the passÃ© composÃ©, except that the auxiliary is in the simple past rather than the present; i.e. j'eus parlÃ© instead of j'ai parlÃ©.

The use of the past anterior is very limited. It is not used in spoken French, and in written French it's generally restricted to subordinate clauses, to express a action or state immediately preceding the main clause. Usually the pedantic and old-fashioned-sounding past anterior can be avoided by rewording the sentence. Some French speakers will replace it with a passÃ© surcomposÃ©.

Examples:

A peine Louis XIV fut-il mort, le Parlement annula son testament.

AussitÃ´t que le duc d'OrlÃ©ans eut prit le pouvoir, il libÃ©ra des centaines de…

Regency (thing)

2005-01-12T02:28:30Z

The history of Ancien RÃ©gime France has had many regencies, most notably the regencies of Anne de Beaujeu (1483-1491), Catherine de MÃ©dicis (1560-1563), Marie de MÃ©dicis (1610-1617), and Anne d'Autriche (1643-1651), but when you say the la RÃ©gence, it always means the period from 1715-1723 when France was ruled by Philippe II, duc d'OrlÃ©ans in the name of the child king Louis XV, his first cousin twice removed.

Preceeding regencies almost always showed a female relative of the king, usually his mother, exercising his authority during his absence or minority. As substitute monarchs, they legally possessed all the authority of the king himself. Toward the end of Louis XIV's life, he and those around him realized that a Regency can create an unstable situation. There were particular concerns about the continuing status of the king's bastards, the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse, who had been given special precedence and…

Le Rouge et le Noir (thing)

2004-08-05T14:57:51Z

Warning: spoilers!

Stendhal's first success as a novelist, Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) follows the social ascent and ultimate fall of peasant adventurer Julien Sorel. In this is follows the tradition of the roman d'apprentissage, well-established in the 18th century by such works as Les Egarements du cÅur et de l'esprit, and Le Paysan parvenu. Unlike the authors of these earlier books, Stendhal makes the novel self-referencing; some of the characters seem to deliberately try to pattern their lives after novels they have read. (Flaubert picks up this trend in Madame Bovary.) Mathilde de la Mole, in particular, seems to think her destiny is to live out a Dumas adventure. Stendhal uses an outdated form with characters who are almost aware that they are living in a novel to portray and expose the outdated and self-conscious regime of his time: France under the Bourbon Restoration.

The novel opens…

Auvergne (place)

2004-07-23T00:45:41Z

County of Auvergne: It was established in 781 for Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, and king of Aquitaine. The breakup of the Carolingian empire made Auvergne a dependency of the counts of Poitiers, administered by viscounts who eventually asserted their independence and claimed the title of count. In 1536 Catherine de Medici, at that time Dauphine of France, inherited the county from her mother's family, La Tour d'Auvergne. In her will she left it to one of Charles IX's bastards, but in 1608 it was given to her daughter, Marguerite de France, who gave it to the current Dauphin, who became Louis XIII in 1610. Louis XIV gave it back to the house of La Tour d'Auvergne in 1651, who kept it until the Revolution.

Faux-bourdon (thing)

2004-07-22T19:40:49Z

Also known as falso bordone, faux-bourdon is a style of vocal partwriting that was used in liturgical and other religious music in the Renaissance. Instead of providing counterpoints to the cantus, as was usually done in Renaissance vocal music, the other parts of faux-bourdon proceed in step. The upper voice sings the cantus, the middle voice is a fourth below, and the lower voice is a third below the middle voice, or a sixth below the upper voice. The qualities of these intervals may change as the parts move through whatever mode the piece is in. For example, in the dorian mode, if the upper voice is singing a D, the middle voice is a perfect fourth below, and the lower voice a major sixth below. To our modern ears, this would sound like a d minor triad in first inversion, but Renaissance composers thought in terms of intervals, not triads.

Composers didn't always stick to strict faux-bourdon structure throughout a given piece; for one thing,…