Jacques Belmont (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jacques_belmont) wrote,@ 2008-05-11 10:16:00 |
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Answers to Olivia Blake
1.) Has he always disliked the taste of alcohol, or was it something that just developed over time? Always. He drinks wine with his meal when there isn't anything else, but he prefers to abstain.
2.) Excluding the Revolution, what does Jacques like to write about most? Philosophical politics. Barring that, the follies and foibles of human relationships. That's where the real comedy of any play lies.
3.) Has his views ever gotten him into trouble in England? Not yet. Granted, he only arrived a few weeks ago and has so far stayed in or around the Embassy.
4.) Say he wrote a play and it was preformed, becoming very popular and in turn it made him rather famous as a playwright. Would he enjoy his fame and why? He would feel extremely awkward about it. As long as he could ride such fame to a seat in the National Assembly, he'd be pretty pleased, but the idea of being everywhere known and celebrated puts him on edge and makes him deeply uneasy. So many unknown people, expecting so many unknown things....
5.) What sort of argument would Jacques make for the Revolution if he were trying to convince someone who was not yet sold on the idea? The Revolution is the culmination of the Enlightenment. France during the Ancien Regime was a terrible place to live. Society was extremely stratified into the Three Estates- the Clergy, the Nobility, and the other 98% of France. Though 2% of the French population controlled most of the nation's resources and wealth, everyone else had to pay taxes both to the church, the nobility who owned the land, and to the state. Peasants had it even worse. They had to work on the roads one day, and on their lord's land another day, and got put to death in horrifyingly brutal ways if they went hunting in their lord's forest, or dared to complain that their lord's pet pigeons had just eaten all the plants in the fields.
What you could be or what you had the opportunity to do relied entirely on who your parents and grandparents were. It didn't matter if you had the most brilliant mind of the century- if your parents were pig farmers, you were a pig farmer. Furthermore, France was millions of livres in debt and the harvests had been terrible. Centuries of frustration at a stupid, ineffective, corrupt form of government, combined with famine and starvation the likes of which had never been seen, and an inept monarchy that brought in troops to fire on rioting French citizens boiled over into the Revolution. The fall of the Bastille meant an end to the aristocratic privileges that kept 98% of France from power or the same sort of property. For perhaps the first time in Europe, you can be anything you have the talent to be. Women can now directly affect the government (fishwives especially- when not selling fish in the markets, they form roving gangs to start riots whenever they're unhappy), every man can vote instead of just those who own property, Jews and Protestants are considered citizens instead of outcasts, slavery's about to be abolished, and the convoluted tax system is amost at an end. The Revolution is not just a bunch of starving peasants destroying a prison; it is a restoration of a society to what it always had the potential to be.
1.) Has he always disliked the taste of alcohol, or was it something that just developed over time? Always. He drinks wine with his meal when there isn't anything else, but he prefers to abstain.
2.) Excluding the Revolution, what does Jacques like to write about most? Philosophical politics. Barring that, the follies and foibles of human relationships. That's where the real comedy of any play lies.
3.) Has his views ever gotten him into trouble in England? Not yet. Granted, he only arrived a few weeks ago and has so far stayed in or around the Embassy.
4.) Say he wrote a play and it was preformed, becoming very popular and in turn it made him rather famous as a playwright. Would he enjoy his fame and why? He would feel extremely awkward about it. As long as he could ride such fame to a seat in the National Assembly, he'd be pretty pleased, but the idea of being everywhere known and celebrated puts him on edge and makes him deeply uneasy. So many unknown people, expecting so many unknown things....
5.) What sort of argument would Jacques make for the Revolution if he were trying to convince someone who was not yet sold on the idea? The Revolution is the culmination of the Enlightenment. France during the Ancien Regime was a terrible place to live. Society was extremely stratified into the Three Estates- the Clergy, the Nobility, and the other 98% of France. Though 2% of the French population controlled most of the nation's resources and wealth, everyone else had to pay taxes both to the church, the nobility who owned the land, and to the state. Peasants had it even worse. They had to work on the roads one day, and on their lord's land another day, and got put to death in horrifyingly brutal ways if they went hunting in their lord's forest, or dared to complain that their lord's pet pigeons had just eaten all the plants in the fields.
What you could be or what you had the opportunity to do relied entirely on who your parents and grandparents were. It didn't matter if you had the most brilliant mind of the century- if your parents were pig farmers, you were a pig farmer. Furthermore, France was millions of livres in debt and the harvests had been terrible. Centuries of frustration at a stupid, ineffective, corrupt form of government, combined with famine and starvation the likes of which had never been seen, and an inept monarchy that brought in troops to fire on rioting French citizens boiled over into the Revolution. The fall of the Bastille meant an end to the aristocratic privileges that kept 98% of France from power or the same sort of property. For perhaps the first time in Europe, you can be anything you have the talent to be. Women can now directly affect the government (fishwives especially- when not selling fish in the markets, they form roving gangs to start riots whenever they're unhappy), every man can vote instead of just those who own property, Jews and Protestants are considered citizens instead of outcasts, slavery's about to be abolished, and the convoluted tax system is amost at an end. The Revolution is not just a bunch of starving peasants destroying a prison; it is a restoration of a society to what it always had the potential to be.