[Marxism] Gay Paris (in its natural context)

["Jeff Rubard" <jeffrubard@xxxxxxxx>]

> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 10:44:05 -0700
> From: Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Marxism] Gay Paris
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Message-ID: <4076E0E5.1950FBA5@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> JeffRubard: "I was speaking of music, and of that music which would be
> played on the boulevards of 19th-century Paris: light, but with limited
> traces of the province."

Right.  Use your imagination.

> There is a time and a place for everything.  Some Parisian streets of
> the late-1800s may have heard that little ditty by Eugene Pottier and
> Pierre Degeyter, "The Internationale", non?

Well, on the understanding I am attempting to inculcate, Paris was the
time and place for everything: "gay" in the early-modern sense, that
is to say amenable to vice, but for all that defensible.  As I suspect
most people here know, the Internationale (which I am "told" was written
in the 1870s, after the fall of the Commune) was once a much more prominent
feature of such affairs as a list subscriber might be invited to:
trade-union and party congresses.  But this is still an attempt on your
part to "rigorize" Marx as a *maitre-penseur* of *decalage*, rather than
a partially approving observer of his material surroundings: I was speaking
of ordinary entertainments, such as were not available to the common person
in "earlier times", and it is my feeling that such "mediocrity for the
masses" is to be more or less wholeheartedly approved of on a Marxist
understanding (there's a reason those books are reprinted as they are
across national boundaries).

Rubard

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