Communications
COMMUNICATIONS A HUMBLE PLEA FOR HISTORY Chicago, 111. TO the Editor:—I have just seen The Captain of the Guard, a motion picture starring John Boles and Laura LaPlante —and I beg to...
...Observe the logical conclusion: Louis XVI was a French king and lived at the French court, so of course the rule applies...
...at the worst he was incapable...
...N. Y. TO the Editor:—One day in the summer of 1910, the train bearing Sir Wilfrid Laurier and his party stopped at a little station near Edmonton...
...Louis XV with profligacy...
...He hardly knows there is anything to govern outside of his silly little court...
...Louis XIV is "magnificent"—that is his label...
...He was, I think, the biggest man I ever saw, a giant not only in height but in all proportions...
...his theme is, of course, "L'etat, c'est moi...
...and all his speeches must be modeled along those lines...
...Even the most lurid tabloid has days of respectability closely approximating that of its Times Square neighbor...
...The Eucharistic Congress at Montreal was coming on, and I asked them if they were going...
...I wonder when Hollywood will become tired of smearing history with false sentiment and give us a fact or two...
...Louis must have been fond of the court ladies, or he was no true Capetian...
...A cart drawn by four oxen had been brought to the platform for him, and all around were men in strange garments and women with shawls and close-clinging headdresses of every color...
...We have already endured far too much of the sickening sentimentality of moving pictures which, whenever they portray the unfortunate Capetians, dwell exclusively on their most unattractive and unmanly traits...
...that his inability to govern France arose from his lack of the proper training, and not at all from vincible ignorance or neglect or stupidity—• surely not from indifference...
...Why does not some brave producer (with a love for the unusual) strike out for himself and tell the truth...
...In The Captain of the Guard we see Louis, a very short time before the fall of the Bastille, hearing for the first time, with calf-like wonder, of the ferment in the country...
...As he moved through the streets in the procession, the Russian mitre adding to his height, not one of all those who lined the streets failed to remark the extraordinary dignity of his bearing...
...Apparently they have forgotten that for a long time before the Revolution broke out he had appointed one Minister of Finance after another in his frantic attempts to relieve the sufferings of his people...
...It is too absurd for the producers to turn out a movie like that as a picture of the French Revolution...
...At the first reception I inquired for him, and was lucky enough to find that the first one I spoke to was a canon from Cracow, who knew him well...
...Now that is decidedly unfair to Louis and Marie Antoinette...
...One need only refer to the London prototype of the American product to observe the ideal form of this type of abbreviated news presentation...
...Certainly one can be charitable and yet say that these progenitors must have been aware that their methods were questionable at best...
...I know that my father, who was of that old school, seemed to sense the whole of it when he visited a Russian shrine in Geneva, and acted accordingly...
...The people were Galicians, and this was a church of the Ruthenian rite, whose congregation spread over a district thirty miles square or more...
...The insinuation is grossly false and contemptible...
...CATHOLIC AND ORTHODOX MENTALITY New York...
...It takes what it gets...
...Hollywood must not be disillusioned...
...Louis XV had a conscience in spite of himself, and there must have been some good in him...
...They said they could not afford to, but asked me to see their archbishop and remember them to him...
...Unhappily I cannot agree with you in your implied assumption that details of abnormal and perverse crimes are printed with the idea that they may be "deterrents...
...And so the idea, traditional but unreal (and therefore sentimental), clings...
...In consequence the fact that they may become "morally responsible" is one which they have considered and rejected wholly or in part according to the states of their individual consciences...
...If any reformation is to be effected, it must be through the tedious and long-drawn-out process of public education...
...Instead they were interested in fortunes to be made through the piling up of tremendous circulations...
...Louis XVI with weakness that falls into weak-mindedness...
...When he stepped out it might have been into a village of eastern Europe...
...And the producers who carry on the worthless legends are painful sentimentalists who cannot see the truth for the legends...
...May they have a speedy recovery...
...Louis XII is associated with senility...
...Possibly the only satisfactory blue-pencil would be one that could eliminate with a single stroke the tabloids and their natural parent— the so-called yellow press...
...It is a matter of history that Louis and Marie Antoinette were devoted to each other...
...Mary Imelda Maher...
...Louis XIV with magnificence...
...Scandals and sensations are amenable, as almost everything else, to the laws of supply and demand...
...When, therefore, word came during the war that he had been arrested and held a long time a close prisoner, there were many, far from Lemberg, who shared the anxiety for his safety...
...At least one of them is delighted to read, twenty years after seeing Archbishop Szeptyckyj, the article in The Commonweal in which he makes understandable to the uninitiate the religious mentality of the East—something not so strange, after all, to those who remember the attitude toward the Eucharist that was familiar fifty years ago and to the generation before that...
...He was touched by the message from the priests at Edmonton, and if they could not come to him he went to them, visiting all the settlements of his compatriots on the western prairie...
...Obviously this narrows down to what the news editor thinks the public wants...
...Scores of oxcarts and a few farm wagons and buggies lined the road to a small wooden church, whose corner-stone the Prime Minister was to lay...
...And not every day, or every week, or every month, provides new fuel for the circulation builder...
...Of the treatment of Marie Antoinette's character I shall only say that just as the king has a lady on his left, so she has a gentleman on her right...
...He must have had some humility in him or he never would have let himself be converted by Madame de Maintenon...
...That sort of thing is connected with certain French kings and is therefore inevitably connected with the French court by the lazy minds that find it difficult to distinguish...
...That is blatantly untrue...
...Unfortunately those responsible for the introduction of the tabloid to New York readers were not intrinsically interested in filling a gap in the journalistic circle...
...The sole basis of such news selection is the well-known maxim: Give the public what it wants...
...This is not to say that there is no definite place in our modern world for the tabloid...
...Why not show Marie Antoinette as the splendid mother that she really was, instead of eternally stressing the "Let-them-eat-cake" side of her character, like the most fanatical propagandists of the Revolution...
...Louis XIV was only a man in spite of his splendor and he must have known it...
...Once seen, the archbishop was easy to identify...
...TO the Editor:—I have just seen The Captain of the Guard, a motion picture starring John Boles and Laura LaPlante —and I beg to protest...
...Personally I have never believed that there was any public demand for a yellow press...
...We went on to Edmonton, taking along two priests of the same rite who had been present at the ceremony...
...The thing is inevitable...
...He is utterly ignorant of the state of the country, utterly innocent of any activity in the matter of government...
...October 29, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 671 The "Hollywood Capetians" are not the portraits of the French Capetians, but merely the sentimental shadows of them, made up from associations...
...Perhaps nothing that Hollywood could invent would be too bad to tag onto Louis XV...
...J. C. W...
...John Sebastian...
...And it is very simple, when a play is made to its baser nature, to educate it to want what is provided...
...And further there is the satiety point at which many readers are eventually bound to arrive...
...But along comes Louis XVI— genuinely good, wholly in love with Marie Antoinette, and sincerely, though unsuccessfully, striving for the good of his people...
...It is appalling that such a small group of men, respected in societies willing to forget over the luncheon or dinner table what is done during business hours, should exert such subversive influence over millions...
...Pictures and sensationalism were the surest and most effective means to hand...
...Meanwhile it is satisfactory to note that even the tabloids have their difficulties...
...It is more appalling that, if this group were converted, there would be fresh ones to take its place...
...His manner was simple and kindly and he was almost democratically accessible...
...Why not, for a change, show Louis XVI as the good clock-maker that he really was...
...These half-truths meant something at first when they were recognized as such, but now, when they are accepted as the only things worth remembering about the characters of history, they are empty ideas, meaningless shadows, mere sentimentality...
...But surely there must have been something else in the character of Louis XII besides that—something to distinguish him from all other very old men...
...These are mere matters of history, however, and must be overlooked...
...Moreover, it is a cowardly thing to distort a character to fit a bit of fiction—especially the character of one who is dead and cannot defend himself...
...These one-sided views have been handed down from one story to another until they have become accepted as the whole truth by readers and audiences—and one begins to wonder if even the authors have any other mental pictures of the characters they write about...
...Louis XII is a doddering old idiot, a sort of court fool, fond of blindman's buff and blond curls...
...Louis XVI was not weak...
...Apparently those who are responsible for it are unaware that Louis called the fitats Generaux for the purpose of saving France...
...In such matters the public is generally passive...
...for the legend must remain unbroken...
...So Louis's character is put through the grinder of a Hollywood studio, and comes out to us as that of a light-headed, ridiculous fop, worse than the stupidest courtier—coyly stuffing grapes into the rosy mouth of the lady on his left, making his inane jokes and basking happily in the applause of a servile court...
...FOR A BIGGER BLUE-PENCIL New York, N. Y. TO the Editor:—Your desire for a bigger blue-pencil to wield against certain features of tabloid publications is admirable in its way but not sufficiently ambitious...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 26
