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Edited byVirginia Davis – Barbara Korte

Honour in the Modern WorldRonald G. AschEternal Fame? Honour and Prestige in Historical Perspective Christian Kühnerkλέος on the Sosias Cup Martin Dorka MorenoThe Envoy’s Honour and Re pu tation in Fifteenth-Century Urban Diplomacy Katharina Jeckel The Reputation of William II I as Mirrored in Roger Morrice’s The Entring Book Nicole PackhaeuserThe Impact of Ridiculousness on Honour and Reputation at the French Court of Louis XIVKelly MinelliAn Actress’s Fame and the Fight for Civil Rights in 1760s FranceAnaïs PedronJean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire”Nigel RitchieVictorian Modest Heroism in Cham bers’s Journal and The Leisure HourChristiane HadamitzkyThe National Joint Committee’s Emi gration Selection Process of 1939Kerrie HollowayStolen Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention in Postwar Germany Katherine Rossy

The Hero as Celebrity in Contemporary British MediaKristina Sperlich

Volume 2 (2016) Special Issue

The Making of Reputations: Honour – Glory – Celebrityhelden.

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Editors’ Preface Virginia Davis – Barbara Korte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Honour: An Idea Which Has Lost Its Purchasing Power in the Modern World? Ronald G. Asch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Eternal Fame? Honour and Prestige in Historical Perspective Christian Kühner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Achilles, Patroklos and Herakles: Conceptions of kλέος on the So-Called Sosias Cup Martin Dorka Moreno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The Envoy’s Honour and Reputation in Fifteenth-Century Urban Diplomacy Katharina Jeckel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

“The visible publick head of the Protestant interest in the World”: The Reputation of William III as Mirrored in Roger Morrice’s The Entring BookNicole Packhaeuser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

“Le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur”: The Impact of Ridiculousness on Honour and Reputation at the French Court of Louis XIVKelly Minelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

“Une contradiction trop absurde”: An Actress’s Fame and the Fight for Civil Rights in 1760s FranceAnaïs Pedron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

“I will leave a name and yours will perish”: How Jean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire” Drove His Bid for PosterityNigel Ritchie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

Contents

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Public vs. Private Honour: The Precarious Case of Victorian Modest Heroism in Chambers’s Journal and The Leisure HourChristiane Hadamitzky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

How to Save a Society: The National Joint Committee’s Emigration Selection Process of 1939 Kerrie Holloway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Hiding in Plain Sight: Stolen Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention in Postwar Germany (1945-1949) Katherine Rossy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

The Hero as Celebrity in Contemporary British Media Kristina Sperlich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Impressum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

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According to dictionary definitions, the word “reputation” refers to the general opinion about someone and something, and it can be used more narrowly with reference to honour and distinction. With both meanings, it is of obvious rele vance to the research of the SFB 948 and its focus on Heroes, Heroisations and Hero-isms. As Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren’s collection of articles (2000) demonstrates for a range of historical examples, the social effect-iveness of the hero ic depends crucially on the reputations that are constructed, both socially and medially, around heroic figures and their achievements . One can easily complement their observations with examples from the cultural field: Honou r and fame are central concepts in classical and medi eval epics; an early modern play like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus projects its titular war-hero’s sense of honour against the superficial veneration of the mass and the image fabri cation of politicians, and a twenty-first century television product, the BBC’s Sherlock, reflects upon the significance of modern media for the hero status of its protagonist, while also mock-ing the excesses of contemporary fan culture . Since reputation is so central to ideas of the heroic, this E-Journal seems a suitable place for a record of the 2015 colloquium for doctoral stu-dents of Queen Mary University of London and the Humanities Graduate School of the Univer-sity of Freiburg, which was held in cooperation with the SFB 948 and discussed a range of his-torically and culturally variable concepts connect-ed with reputation(s) and the processes through which reputations are made, remade and some-times unmade. Several papers published here are directly concerned with issues of heroic reputation and neighbouring concepts such as honour, fame, glory and celebrity. Others ad-dress the significance of reputations for specific social roles (such as that of the late medieval envoy), for remembrance and commemoration (as in the case of Marat), in politically sensitive situations (such as the dynastic shift in England caused by the Glorious Revolution), in specific social settings (such as the seventeenth-century French court and the eighteenth-century French

theatrical scene), or in the institutional handling of ethically challenging situations, such as hu-manitarian intervention during and after the up-heavals caused by the Second World War. All these examples demonstrate the importance of opinions about others in social and political life, and the mechanisms through which opinions are created, disseminated, regulated, reflected and debated, by various agents and in various medi a. Whether heroic or not, reputations can have significant symbolic capital and serious social consequences, especially where they are long-lived or even monumentalised. This becomes prominent where reputations are seriously de-bated, such as le ridicule in seventeenth-century France, or ‘true’ honour and heroism in Victorian Britain. The present cultural moment, by con-trast, seems to be marked by a tendency towards the commodification and total mediatisation of reputation, and its apparent degradation in the form of shallow celebrity – a short-lived, fashion-able fame that is seemingly detached from social values and attainable by everybody who is will-ing to make a spectacle of him- or herself. The essays in this issue can only address a few facets of a large conceptual field. Taken together, however, they highlight a number of research trajectories and help to locate heroic repu tations in the wider context of opinions and their social effectiveness. We would like to thank our authors for revising their papers for publica-tion, and Ronald Asch and Christian Kühner for their framing comments . Last but not least, we would like to thank Dr. Ulrike Zimmermann, Daniel Hefflebower, Alena Bauer and Magdalena Gybas for their help with getting this issue ready for publication.Virginia Davis is Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary University of London. Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg.

Works CitedCubitt, Geoffrey, and Allen Warren, eds. Heroic Reputations

and Exemplary Lives. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.

Editors’ Preface

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In April 1967, two French members of parlia-ment met for a fateful encounter . One of them was Gaston Defferre, a Protestant and socialist from Southern France who had served for more than thirty years as mayor of Marseille . The other was René Ribière, a conservative polit-ician and supporter of de Gaulle, who had been verbally attacked by Defferre during a debate with the words “shut up you stupid beast!” – a phrase which could not easily be classified as normal parliamentary language even in the French Chamber. Ribière took offence and chal-lenged Defferre to a duel with swords. In France there existed a long and venerable tradition of parliamentary duels going back to the early nine-teenth century .1 Admittedly, from the later nine-teenth century onwards, the number of men ac-tually killed in such duels declined markedly, and supporters of the more traditional deadly duels among the military class and the old aristocracy saw the fights between deputies and/or journal-ists as mere play-acting and a slightly ridiculous imitation of their own traditions .2 However, since Ribière insisted on swords instead of pistols, the chance that one of the two participants would be seriously wounded was real enough . In the end Defferre, who was more experienced in this sort of fight, got the upper hand. He wounded his op-ponent, and after a few more minutes the duel was abandoned. Honour had been satisfied. Inter estingly, Ribière’s second in this memorable encounter was a man who became fond in later years of wearing flamboyant red coats and mak-ing stupid gestures every time his daughter gave a public speech – Jean-Marie le Pen.3 Today, in particular in Germany, it would be inconceivable that politicians challenge each other to a duel, even though the founder of the German Social Democratic Party, Ferdinand La-salle, died in a duel in the 1860s (but he had challenged his opponent not for political reasons but because he had been refused the hand of the woman he loved by her father). The idea that men, and in particular certain kinds of men, such

as members of the military class, noblemen or politicians, have a particular honour which they need to defend, if needs be by force of arms if they do not want to become social outcasts, is totally alien to modern society . The same holds true for the idea that women, if they lose their honour, for instance in an erotic affair, have little choice but to commit suicide. True enough there are certain communities where men still see it as their task to take revenge on out siders who dare to approach or insult the women of the commu-nity and who do not hesitate to kill the women themselves if they step out of line . However, outside such very special commu-nities, what men and women appear to seek toda y is not honour but rather prestige and, more than anything, some kind of celebrity sta-tus . Many seem to feel that it is worthwhile to pay almost any price to become famous and attract attention in the media, and they risk ridi-cule and even social disdain instead of being satisfied with some kind of honourable existence in the shade. In that sense infamy is preferable to obscurity. The search for a moment of fame, the attempt to become a celebrity at least for a single moment as a sort of one-minute wonder, has become a sort of obsession in our societies, and entire television programmes cater for this obsession and nothing else. The notion of celeb-rity, which first came to the fore in the eighteenth century, as Antoine Lilti (2014) has recently em-phasised, is tied to a notion of prestige which is short-lived. Rousseau was perhaps the first per-sonality who tried to achieve, in his Confessions, the kind of celebrity status that is characteristic of the present day: The here and now is more important than posterity, and modern celebrities try to create the impression that their admirers gain access to their most intimate experiences and their private lives, whereas the hero with a claim to everlasting fame in more traditional societies is seen more as a distant figure larger than life – somebody we can admire but not be friends with or on intimate terms . That is an im-portant difference.

Honour: An Idea Which Has Lost Its Purchasing Power in the Modern World?

Ronald G. Asch

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a position which gave one a chance to promote one’s image relying not only on the written word and on laudatory sermons, but also through works of art – including a monumental tomb after one’s death . What people sought was, as I have already pointed out, not so much or not ex-clusively celebrity in the here and now, but glory and fame for a coming age, a fame from which their descendants, their dynasty should benefit as much as their own memory . This idea that real fame has to be something which will sur-vive in the future has largely disappeared, being too much bound up with the values of a society where the individual subordinates him- or herself to greater corporate entities or communities: be it the family, the church, or a social group in the sense of an estate rather than a class or society as a whole . In fact, one can certainly say that societies where notions of honour and shame are of para-mount importance are those where social sta-tus is largely defined in terms of membership to social groups which are constituted not just by criteria such as income and power but also by legal privileges and a common lifestyle with a strong normative component (cf. Weber 534-538). Belonging to this group conveys a particu-lar dignity or claim to honour on a person, but one can also forfeit this claim if one fails to live up to the shared values of the group, at least in public.5 Conflicts over status symbols and prece-dence are so important because their outcome determines a person’s place within a given sta-tus group and can, if things go wrong, ultimate-ly also endanger his or her membership to the group as such . In some way the cultural system of values which gives stability to a society is constantly reproduced and renegotiated in such conflicts or in ostentatious symbolic displays of claims to honour and prestige .6 Such symbolic contests are of crucial importance for societies in which membership in certain status groups entails a special claim to a specific dignity and honour. The reputation somebody enjoys, the person’s honour, is not just a social capital which can be transformed into power and authority if needs be. It gives him or her credit among their equals, their clients or a wider public, and to pre-serve this honour is part of the daily struggle for social survival. Thus to talk about honour and reputation within the context of a medieval or early modern society is quite a different matter than talking about fame and celebrity within the context of a society which is based on the as-sumption that everybody is in legal terms equal and that a claim to dignity is a fundamental and non-negotiable right every human being enjoys.

The fact that fame and celebrity have become more important today than honour is not to say that a sense of honour and shame has totally disappeared from our culture. Businessmen who go bust do still from time to time commit suicide – although they rarely work in the financial indus-try, where these matters are taken much more lightly, as one is glad to observe. In France, a local mayor and member of the senate who was accused of having arranged weddings between rich Chinese couples eager to be wed in France for cash recently committed suicide with his hunt-ing rifle, very much in style one would say. After this shocking event the President of the French senate accused the media but indirectly also the public prosecutors of having put pressure on the mayor without taking account of his hon-our (“sans considération pour l’honneur”) . Thus the notion of honour has not disappeared from public life as completely as one might expect, at least in France .4 In fact some soci ologists be-lieve that France is still to some extent a soci-ety of orders, not of classes. Because serving or obeying somebody else is seen as a loss of dignity and honour, relations between employers and employees are so fraught with tensions in France . Each social group is defending not just its material interests but its specific honour, and social esteem and credit depend only to a limit-ed extent on wealth and power. The ability to demonstrate one’s superiority by mastering cer-tain codes of social behaviour by being familiar with the latest novel or certain classics has re-mained of essential importance in French soci-ety (cf. d’Iribarne 56-93; cf. Bourdieu). France may be a special case but even out-side France there is one accusation which drives those who are on the receiving side quite fre-quently into suicide even today: the accusation of sexual abuse where adolescents or, even worse, young children are concerned. But is it, in this case, a sense of shame which drives the po-tential perpetrators into suicide even if they may in reality be innocent, or is it the enormous social pressure which they face should they be put on trial and be exposed in the media? There is no doubt that the changing media landscape has transformed deeply our notions not just of honour and shame, but also of fame and celebrity. In the age of the internet an image can spread within minutes from one corner of the world to the next . In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, on the other hand, celebrity and social prestige were often much more a local or regional phenomenon. In order to be famous nationwide or all over Europe one normally had to be a member of the topmost elite, a monarch, a prince of the church or a saint, and needed

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Honour in the Modern World

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judge-ment of Taste. Transl. by Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 2010 .

D’Iribarne, Philippe. La logique de l’honneur: Gestion des en-terprises et traditions nationales. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989 .

Drévillon, Hervé, and Diego Venturino, eds. Penser et vivre l’honneur à l’époque moderne. Rennes: PU, 2011.

Geifes, Stefan. Das Duell in Frankreich 1789-1830: Zum Wandel von Diskurs und Praxis in Revolution, Kaiser reich und Restauration. (Pariser Historische Studien; 102). Mu-nich: Oldenbourg, 2013.

Huet, Sophie. “Le Sénat sous le choc après le suicide de Jean Germain” . Le Figaro 7 April 2015. 4 September 2015 <http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan/2015/04/07/25001-20150407ARTFIG00288-le-senat-sous-le-choc-apres-le-suicide-de-jean-germain.php>.

Lilti, Antoine . Figures publiques: L’Invention de la célébrité 1750-1850 . Paris: Fayard, 2014 .

Schnee, Philipp. “Hauen und Stechen um Ruhm und Ehre.” Spiegel Online. 2 October 2009. 18 August 2015 <http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/beruehmte-duelle-a-948518.html>.

Schreiner, Klaus, and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds. Verletzte Ehre: Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 1995.

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. Rituale . Frankfurt a . M .: Campus Verlag, 2013 .

Weber, Max. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 81976 .

Nevertheless, as we pointed out in our call for papers for this colloquium, the quest for prestige and for a positive public reputation is an impor-tant factor in determining individual behaviour in all societies, regardless of whether they are more traditional or not, or whether they are “western” or belong to some other culture.

Ronald G. Asch is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Freiburg and a mem-ber of the Collaborative Research Centre 948.

1 See Schnee (2015).

2 On the history of the duel see Geifes (2013) .

3 On Le Pen’s recent conflict with his daughter see: 18 August 2015 <http://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/Jean-Marie-Le-Pen-un-mois-de-declarations-polemiques-731074>.

4 Cf . Huet (2015) .

5 For the notion of honour see, for example, the volumes edited by Drévillon/Venturino (2011) and Schreiner/Schwer-hoff (1995).

6 See also the monograph on rituals by Barbara Stoll-berg-Rilinger (2013).

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With the rise of cultural history in the last dec-ades, historians have turned their attention to the norms and values of past societies as ob-jects of analysis in their own right. Unlike more traditional historiographical subjects – persons, places, or laws – phenomena like love, friend-ship, or feelings are much more elusive at first glance . Their historical analysis presupposes in-tensive methodological reflection. It has become apparent that studies on such subjects have to take into account historical semantics, the his-tory of words and their meanings, which then of course has to be linked to the social and cultural context of the society in question . Honour, the theme of this collection of essays, clearly is such a subject. In analysing it, one has first to bear in mind that the meaning of a notion like honour can evolve considerably over time. Second, it needs to be taken into account that cultural norms or values like honour are not legal or scholarly con-cepts, and that they thus do not have an ‘official’ definition; they are concepts of everyday life and are thus inherently poly semic, often referring to different phenomena by the same word, and this even within a given society at a given time. Se-mantic differences between different languages have to be reckoned with as well; they represent an additional level of complexity . The essays presented here do, of course, not add up to a history of honour in the West . Many other place s and periods within the history of Europe (and North America) could be added and would fur-ther complicate the picture. Nor can this essay be a history of the European concept of honour in a nutshell . It will rather, much more modestly, suggest some elements in the long-term evolu-tion of ideas about honour in Europe. Honour is not an entirely new subject of re-search in history and the social sciences . Among relevant studies, Frank Henderson Stewart’s monograph Honor (1994) stands out due to its systematic and cross-cultural approach to the phenomenon of honour .1 Taking into account the fact that honour is a multi-faceted phenomenon, Stewart proposes a dichotomy between “hori-zontal” and “vertical” honour (Stewart 54-64).

Horizontal honour, in this model, is a right to re-spect enjoyed among one’s peers; these peers form an “honor group” which Stewart defines as “a set of people who follow the same code of honor and who recognize each other as doing so” (Stewart 54). Vertical honour, by contrast, is defined by Stewart as “the right to special respect enjoyed by those who are superior, whether by virtue of their abilities, their rank, their services to the community, their sex, their kin relationship, their office, or anything else” (Stewart 59). Stew-art’s model, then, already points to the fact that honour is of great importance in societies which enshrine the principles of hierarchy and inequal-ity in their social (and often even legal) order – a fact that makes honour an important topic in the context of pre-modern European societies. Other authors, especially in the French his-tori ographical tradition, have highlighted the difference between honour and reputation.2 Moreover, as Ronald G . Asch (2005) points out, honour, especially in the nobility, had a lot to do with rank and status, and also with conflicts among individual members of the elite about their respect ive rank .3 It seems important to add one more aspect to the conceptual discussions about honour: the difference between, on the one hand, honour as a sense of personal dignity, and prestige on the other – especially in its more exalted forms like glory and fame . In medieval and early modern Europe, hon-our permeated society; each social group – with the notable exception of social outcasts, such as executioners, who were thought to be without honour – had their own form of honour. An indi-vidual’s personal honour was thus shaped by the social group to which he or she belonged. Hon-our was, moreover, a clearly gendered concept . Female honour was – more or less independent-ly of social status – tied to chastity, which, at least as a norm, meant abstinence before mar-riage and lifelong fidelity after marriage. Male honour was more diversified according to status. For a craftsman’s and a merchant’s honour, hon-esty in business was a core value; for noblemen, bravery and courage were essential.4 Loss of

Eternal Fame?Honour and Prestige in Historical Perspective

Christian Kühner

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The society of estates which formed in Europe since the Middle Ages gave rise to a very spe-cific concept of honour in the sense of personal dignity. As mentioned above, each group had their own, specific honour, and what was hon-ourable for members of one group was not ne-ces sarily honourable for those of another. Noble honour, for example, required that nobles refrain from manual labour, which they saw as a me-nial task – but which was an honourable task for peasants and craftsmen. Valour in combat was very honourable for nobles – whereas cler-ics were expected to refrain from carrying and using arms . The patrician elites of the city of Nördlingen which Katharina Jeckel describes in her essay present an interesting case . In many imperial cities of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire, the merchant elite rose to power, thus approaching a status comparable to the nobility.6 However, as Jeckel’s essay shows, their concept of honour remained a civilian one . Even though Jeronimus von Bopfingen had served as a mer-cenary, he was obviously first and foremost a ci-vilian counsellor and envoy, and did not derive his high status within Nördlingen’s urban society from military exploits . With the beginning of the early modern period, the traditional order of honour and pres-tige became more and more precarious. In the society of estates, one’s place in the social hier-archy was determined to a large extent by birth; this place, in turn, determined which specific code of honour one had to follow . Prestige, es-pecially in its exalt ed forms like fame and glory, was reserved for those at the very top of society, kings and aristocrats . One might argue that the artists of the Italian Renaissance were the first to deviate from this model . For a large part of the Middle Ages, artists did not sign their works . Leonardo da Vinc i and Michelangelo, by con-trast, were fam ous already during their lifetime; this reputation then contributed to turning them into larger-than-life figures of the European trad-ition in the eyes of posterity. Shifting tendencies regarding who had access to fame and glory, and how repu tation was shaped, however, were not random . It was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century which began to re-structure the flow of information in Europe. As printing technology matured, books gradually became more affordable for larger parts of the population; periodic publications also began to emerge, resulting in the birth of the newspaper. Nicole Packhaeuser shows how the emerging modern public sphere changed the mechanisms of creating a reputation – and, if one knew how to influence them, offered new possibilities to shape it. William of Orange obviously was aware

honour brought shame; codes of honour also regulated quite clearly what had to be done to restore honour. Here, of course, the warrior-like nobles of the pre-modern West provide the most striking examples . The feud and later the duel are classic examples of mechanisms which could restore honour . The duel, in particular, demonstrated courage (as one faced the danger of death) and the unwillingness to take insults .5 It was difficult to refuse a duel if one was chal-lenged; in this case, the offender who refused to provide satisfaction to the offended lost his own honour. The offended, in turn, was under social pressure to challenge his offender; this, how-ever, was only the case if the offender was of a social status high enough to matter. A nobleman would not challenge a commoner to a duel if he had offended him – and would prove by this very gesture that the commoner was so much below him that he was simply unable to offend him, no matter what he said . The whole system of duel rules, then, was intricately linked both to social hierarchy and to aristocratic masculinity . Whereas defending one’s honour was an ob-ligation, not an option, prestige was not some-thing medieval and early modern Euro peans were obliged to seek. For the mass of the popu-lation, the peasants, striving for glory or fame would have been an outlandish wish, and it would probably have been seen by both their peers and the social elites as reprehensible van-ity . If there was a social group which could feel a certain pressure of expectation to seek glory, this was the nobility, more precisely, aristo cratic men. However, the quest for glory was by no means as compulsory for a nobleman as de-fending his honour. A nobleman who preferred living peacefully on his lands instead of seeking glory during military campaigns would not have acquired a heroic reputation, but he would not have lost his honour . These considerations are of particular import-ance because when one speaks of honour (or Ehre, honneur, onore) today, the concept is still heavily shaped by its medieval and early modern meanings . Many societies of classical an tiquity were organised quite differently from those of the medieval and early modern West, and it would be interesting to compare their respective notions of honour. In this issue, Martin Dorka Moreno analyses an ancient society which had some striking parallels with the feudal societies of later centuries. Just like pre-modern Western European nobles, the aristocrats of the Homeric epics were a warrior elite. Prestige was first and foremost acquired through deeds of martial val-our . In the Greek myths, glory and fame were for kings or even demi-gods.

Christian Kühner

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Eternal Fame? Honour and Prestige in Historical Perspective

was a commoner; the aristocrats of Versailles who lived a hundred years earlier would prob-ably not have understood how he could dare to aspire to glory in the first place. Christiane Hadamitzky describes a nine-teenth-century context which shows how trad-itional norms of honour and heroism were falling apart in a post-French Revolution world. One could no longer pretend that accidents of birth were a sufficient reason to reserve prestige to the upper classes; however, it would have been absurd for middle-class Victorians to aspire to be knights in shining armour . The model of heroism advocated by Chambers’s Journal was instead one which admonished readers to be heroes of everyday life and precisely not to seek fame and glory, but to take pride in moral – one might also say: honourable – conduct in their daily lives. Both Kerrie Holloway and Katherine Rossy analyse cases in which honour in a traditional sense seems not to be a category that structures social interaction . In the case of intellectuals who had fled from Spain at the end of the Civil War, and of German parents who had adopted children forcibly separated from their families in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, it was repu tation that was important, not honour. Arguably, trad-itional concepts of honour, which presuppose ideas about social order and a clearly defined role of each group in the whole of society, were ill-placed to make sense of the crisis situation in a refugee camp or in a destroyed, occupied country. Moreover, in the case of the Spanish republicans, many were intellectuals – a group that owed its origin and identity to modernity and so did not have a traditional code of honour . Kristina Sperlich’s essay may at first glance seem to contradict the idea that it is modern soci-ety with its plurality of social roles, individu alised careers and non-traditional professions7 which made it more and more difficult to maintain trad-itional codes of honour. Johnson Be harry seems to be a very traditional hero: a sol dier awarded with a highly prestigious medal for his bravery. But perhaps the apparent similarities disguise profound dissimilarities. First of all, Beharry was not, during his active service, a military lead-er; nor did he have an aristocratic or other elite background. Second, his heroic deed was to save the life of fellow soldiers rather than con-quering a city or winning a battle. While an early modern society would certainly have approved of Be harry’s brave behaviour, his story would prob-ably not have been displayed very prominently – military glory was reserved, first and foremost, to kings and aristocratic generals conquering enemy lands and humiliating the enemies in battle. The fact that the Victoria Cross is a

of this situation, and pursued a “public relations” strategy avant la lettre . The emerging world of newspapers meant, however, that the reputation of public figures was now prone to short-term changes – probably much more than in earlier centuries, where, in the absence of newspapers, visual forms of communication like monuments and paintings allowed for the creation of more permanent images of rulers . Nevertheless, there were still elites which had inherited codes of honour from their medi-eval ancestors but now lived under changing cir-cumstances . As Kelly Minelli points out, ridicu-lousness became a danger to one’s reputation in the world of the French court of the seventeenth century. It was in a manner of speaking a blind spot in traditional codes of honour: A nobleman who was fooled by another could not really chal-lenge his opponent for this, as it was his own candidness that had led him into the trap . In the case of open mockery, one might assume that there was a fine line between a joke and an in-sult, which would indeed have constituted a rea-son to ask for satisfaction – be it through a duel (which was illegal, but nevertheless practiced by the nobles) or by invoking a high aristocrat as a mediator. Even if the embarrassment of ridicu-lousness could force noblemen to leave court for some time, they obviously could return after a while, when court gossip had found the next sub-ject . An outright insult or the act of not accept-ing a duel challenge would most probably not have been forgotten so quickly, if at all. Ridicu-lousness may have damaged a reputation, but it obviously did not des troy a nobleman’s honour beyond repair, as an insult did if one did not ask for satisfaction . The eighteenth century saw a continual growth and development of the fledgling mod-ern public sphere. Anaïs Pedron analyses a situation in which the contradictions between traditional norms and the modern public sphere reached a paroxysm: What to do if a person from a group which traditionally was thought to have no honour (in this case, an actress) acquired fame? Hippolyte Clairon obviously was already a celebrity in the modern sense of the word – a social role which has its roots in the eighteenth century, as Antoine Lilti (2014) has pointed out . The obvious conclusion from a modern point of view – getting rid of the idea of ‘dishonourable’ professions altogether – was only drawn by the French Revolution . It is in this revolution that Jean-Paul Marat tried to acquire glory, as Nigel Ritchie shows. The mere idea that glory could now be achieved by a journalist instead of a warrior or general indicates the rapid change of values . Marat, moreover,

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Christian Kühner studied at the University of Freiburg and at the Sorbonne and graduated with a bi-national PhD from the University of Freiburg and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). As a postdoc, he spent one academic year each at the European University Institute in Florence, at Stanford University and at the University of Cambridge, before returning to Freiburg in 2013, where he teaches as a lec-turer in early modern European history .

1 For a German-language overview see Speitkamp (2010).

2 I owe the terminological distinction between ‛honour’ and ‛reputation’ to Hervé Drévillon. For the notions of honneur and réputation in early modern Europe see Drévillon/Ven-turino (2011) .

3 On honour in sixteenth-century Europe see Jouanna (1968). Conflicts about honour in medieval and early modern European societies are analysed in Schreiner/Schwerhoff (1995) .

4 On aristocratic honour in early modern Europe see Asch (2005); for Britain and especially Ireland, Kane (2010), and for France, Neuschel (1989).

5 On the duel see Cavina (2005) and the collections by Ludwig (2012) and Schultz (1996). For early modern Eng-land, see Peltonen (2003), and for early modern France Brioist/Drévillon/Serna (2002) and Billacois (1986). For revo-lutionary and post-revolutionary France, see Geifes (2013), Guillet (2008), Jeanneney (2004) . For imper ial Germany, see Bringmann (1997), and for nineteenth- and twentieth- century Germany, Frevert (1995). For early modern and nine teenth-century Bavaria, see Walter (2002), and on early modern Spain Chauchadis (1997).

6 For the development of the patrician class and their rise to power see, for example, Freitag (42011) .

7 Sociological research has explored these characteristics of modern societies in great detail; one may cite in particular Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (1998); Nas-sehi, Geschlossenheit und Offenheit (2003) (Studien zur Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft 1); idem, Gesellschaft der Gegenwarten. (2011) (Studien zur Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft 2) .

Works Cited

Asch, Ronald G. “‘Honour in all parts of Europe will be ever like itself’: Ehre, adlige Standeskultur und Staatsbildung in England und Frankreich im späten 16 . und im 17 . Jahrhun-dert .” Staatsbildung als kultureller Prozess: Strukturwandel und Legitimation von Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit . Eds. Ronald G. Asch, and Dagmar Freist. Cologne: Böh-lau, 2005: 353-379.

Billacois, François. Le duel dans la société française des XVIe-XVIIe siècles: Essai de psychosociologie historique . Ed. de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Paris: 1986 .

Bringmann, Tobias C. Reichstag und Zweikampf: Die Duell-frage als innenpolitischer Konflikt des deutschen Kaiser-reichs 1871-1918. Freiburg: Hochschulverlag, 1997.

mid-nineteenth-century creation, as Sperlich points out, is telling in itself: It was only then that the need was felt to give official recognition in the form of an award to simple soldiers from the mid-dle or working classes, and not only to officers from the nobility. The modernity of Beharry’s case rests thus not only in his media presence which, as Sperlich convincingly argues, makes him both a hero and a celebrity; the nature of his heroism is modern itself . In the long run, then, it seems that the mani-fest loss of importance that the concept of hon-our has undergone has a lot to do with social transformations, especially with the end of the society of orders and, one might add, the end of tightly-knit organised social groups such as guilds. The sociologist Georg Simmel (1890) arg ued that modern humans find themselves at the intersection of many “social circles”; in other words, modern society gives rise to a multitude of social situations with different expectations of be-haviour – at home, at work, among friends, or on public transport. Many of these social situ ations are specifically modern, and traditional codes of honour could not be of much help to navigate them . Moreover, since the French Revo lution, the idea that there was a natural, hier archical order of society determined by birth did certainly not die from one day to the next – but it existed henceforth on borrowed time because it could no longer claim to be self-evident. If an individual could change his or her social position, then the obvious connection between a person’s origin, estate or profession and honour was broken. Reputation, a more malleable concept – less prescriptive, more individual – became a more suitable category to structure social interactions. In parallel, the idea vanished that fame and glory were reserved for the elite . The modern public sphere gave rise to celebrities; compared to traditional heroes, the modern celebrity role has less prescriptive elements. A celeb rity’s repu tation can even be a problematic one – something traditional heroism, with its strong moral underpinnings, did not allow for . So, if present-day Western societies no longer operate with the ideas of “keeping”, “losing” or “defending” one’s honour, then analysing the concepts of honour of pre-modern societies be-comes a task for historical studies. Understand-ing what people in a given past society referred to when they spoke of “honour” provides insights into a key element of their system of norms and values and allows for a better understanding of social roles and interactions in that society .

Christian Kühner

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Eternal Fame? Honour and Prestige in Historical Perspective

Ludwig, Ulrike, Barbara Krug-Richter, and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds . Das Duell: Ehrenkämpfe vom Mittelalter bis zur Mo-derne. Constance: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012.

Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft . Frank-furt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998.

Nassehi, Armin. Geschlossenheit und Offenheit . Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003.

---. Gesellschaft der Gegenwarten. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011.

Neuschel, Kristen B. Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Cul-ture in Early Modern France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Peltonen, Markku . The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour. Cambridge: UP, 2003.

Schreiner, Klaus, and Gerd Schwerhoff, eds. Verletzte Ehre: Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der Frü-hen Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 1995.

Schultz, Uwe, ed. Das Duell: Der tödliche Kampf um die Ehre. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel-Verlag, 1996.

Simmel, Georg. Über sociale Differenzierung: Sociologische und psychologische Untersuchungen. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890.

Speitkamp, Winfried. Ohrfeige, Duell und Ehrenmord: Eine Geschichte der Ehre. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010.

Stewart, Frank Henderson. Honor. Chicago: UP, 1994.

Walter, Wolfgang . Das Duell in Bayern: Ein Beitrag zur baye-rischen Strafrechtsgeschichte . Frankfurt a . M .: Lang, 2002 .

Brioist, Pascal, et al. Croiser le fer: Violence et culture de l’épée dans la France moderne (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) . Seysse l: Champ Vallon, 2002.

Cavina, Marco . Il sangue dell’onore: Storia del duello . Rome: GLF Editori Laterza, 2005 .

Chauchadis, Claude . La loi du duel: Le code du point d’hon-neur dans l’Espagne des XVIe-XVIIe siècles. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 1997 .

Drévillon, Hervé, and Diego Venturino, eds. Penser et vivre l’honneur à l’époque moderne. Rennes: PU, 2011.

Freitag, Matthias . Kleine Regensburger Stadtgeschichte . Regensburg: Pustet, 42011 .

Frevert, Ute. Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Ge-sellschaft. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1995.

Geifes, Stefan. Das Duell in Frankreich 1789-1830: Zum Wandel von Diskurs und Praxis in Revolution, Kaiserreich und Restauration. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013.

Guillet, François. La mort en face: Histoire du duel de la Révolution à nos jours. Paris: Aubier, 2008.

Jeanneney, Jean-Noël. Le duel. Une passion française (1789-1914). Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 2004.

Jouanna, Arlette . “Recherches sur la notion d’honneur au XVIe siècle.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 15 (1968): 597-623.

Kane, Brendan. The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641. Cambridge: UP, 2010.

Lilti, Antoine . Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité (1750-1850) . Paris: Fayard, 2014 .

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Greek Heroes and Literary Concepts of Honour, Glory and Fame

In ancient Greek poetry, several terms differ-entiate the semantic field of honour, glory, and fame: tιμή, time: ‘worship, esteem, honour’; κûδος, kudos: ‘glory, renown, charismatic splen-dor’; and kλέος, kléos: ‘glory, fame, that which is heard’, or, according to Gregory Nagy, ‘the poem or song that conveys glory, fame, that which is heard’ [my emphasis] .2 What their translations only slightly suggest is that the terms mediate between different, oscillating aspects of the con-cepts of honour, glory and fame .3

Ruth Scodel, in her book Epic Facework: Self-presentation and Social Interaction in Ho-mer (2008), argues that the Homeric society is fundamentally concerned with the idea of tιμή and that the Homeric heroes interrelate to and interact with each other by the means of an eco-nomic system of honour of which τιμή, κûδος, kλέος and “face”, in the sense of social appear-ance, are essential constituents (cf. Scodel 1-32). To systematise, Scodel defines κûδος and kλέος as subcategories of tιμή: kλέος, as a ze-ro-sum system, is not dividable, and nobody can share the hero’s kλέος except those who are in a very close relationship to him, such as father and son. κûδος, in turn, “is an all-or-nothing-property – opponents cannot have it simultaneously, for whoever has it wins”; a whole group, however, can share it (Scodel 26). In addition, Scodel ar-gues that αἰδώς, (‘reverence, awe, respect for the feeling or opinion of others or for one’s own conscience, and so shame and self-respect’), is strongly associated with tιμή because it intern-alises the latter. To extend on Scodel’s idea, these concepts are similar to a habitus, they are internalised patterns “that generate […] typical thoughts, perceptions, and actions […]”, and, thus, in the case of the Homeric heroes, repre-sent a distinct form of their heroism (Bourdieu 143) .4 Worship, esteem, and honour are inextric-ably connected to reverence and shame.5

While Scodel’s systematisation is relativel y straightforward and works with clear-cut catego-ries, James M. Redfield’s assessment of the se-mantic field of honour/glory/fame suggests that especially kλέος and κûδος are flickering, even more differentiated classifications of qualities. Redfield’s concise remarks deserve to be cited in full:

[…] kleos is something the heroes prize and strive for . There is […] a curious reci-procity between the bard and his heroes. The bard sings of events which have a kleos; without the heroes he would have nothing to sing about. At the same time, the bard confers on his heroes a kleos, without which they would have no exist-ence in the later world of the bardic au-dience . […] Kleos means, among other things, “news”, as when Telemachus asks Eumaeus, “What’s the news from town?” (xvi .461) . One can hear the kleos of a particular event (XI .21, xxiii .137) . Kleos is “what men say,” and a thing has a kleos if it is talked about. Thus, an expedition or a war has a kleos (XI .227, XIII .364) […], and an object may have kleos . Poseidon complains that the kleos of the Greek wall in the plain of Troy will extend “as far as the dawn is scattered” (VII .451) . The kleos of Nestor’s shield “reaches heaven” (VIII .192) . […] a warrior acquires kleos when he wins on the battlefield especially famous armor (XVII .131) . […] Like human things, human places also have a kleos . […] A man has a kleos which is his reputa-tion […] . Thus a man may have the kleos of a warrior (XVII.143), a bowman (V.172), a spearman and counsellor (xvi.241-42). […] Kleos can be earned on the battlefield (V.3, XVIII.121), especially by some great act […] . As a quality or possession kleos stands in relation and contrast to two other terms: kudos and timē . […] Kudos is a kind of luster or mana which belongs to the suc-cessful . Kudos is specifically personal; a man may be kudos to others – a success-

Achilles, Patroklos and HeraklesConceptions of kλέος on the So-Called Sosias Cup1

Martin Dorka Moreno

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good and great, | who was raised in fertile Thrace the mother of sheep. | Kissēs in his own house raised him when he was little. | Kissēs was his mother’s father, father to Theano, the one with the fair cheeks . | When he [= Iphidamas] reached the stage of adolescence, which brings luminous glory, | he [= Kissēs] wanted to keep him at home and to give him his own daughter in marriage, | but as soon as he [= Iphidamas] had married, he left the bride chamber and went off seeking the kleos of the Achaeans | along with twelve curved ships that followed him .6

And in Iliad 10, 410-416, Achilles himself ex-plains his attitude towards his kλέος:

My mother Thetis, goddess with silver steps, tells me that I carry the burden of two different fated ways [kēres] leading to the final moment [telos] of death . If I stay here and fight at the walls of the city of the Trojans, then my safe homecoming [nos-tos] will be destroyed for me, but I will have a glory [kleos] that is imperishable [aphthi-ton]. Whereas if I go back home, returning to the dear land of my forefathers, then it is my glory [kleos], genuine [esthlon] as it is, that will be destroyed for me, but my life force [aiōn] will then last me a long time, and the final moment [telos] of death will not be swift in catching up with me.7

Adhering to these words and arguing along Nagy’s lines, one might say that Homeric he-roes not only value and strive for, but are fanat-ically invested in the concept of kλέος, of kλέος ἄφθιτον, to be precise, and are fully aware of the fact – at least in the case of self-reflecting Achil-les – that they must die to get it: “Achilles the hero gets included in the Iliad by dying a warrior’s death . The consolation prize for his death is the kleos of the Iliad” (Nagy, Greek Hero 29),8 which makes him imperishable, which gives him kλέος ἄφθιτον, and has thus an “immortalizing power” (Nagy, Greek Hero 31). This obsession is not only the driving force for Achilles, a ‘macro-hero’ of the Iliad, but it can also be found in the narra-tive of ‘micro-heroes’ such as Iphidamas, whom we hear about only in Iliad 11. 218-228. The he-roes’ kλέος ἄφθιτον is, thus, dependent on the poet who relates their story to the world . That is why, following Nagy, I have given the transla-tion ‘the poem or song that conveys glory, fame, that which is heard’ for kλέος; extending on Red-field’s suggested reciprocity between bard and hero one might add, again with Nagy, that kλέος refers “to both the medium and the message of the glory of heroes […]”, which makes kλέος “the primary medium for communicating the concept of the hero” (Nagy, Greek Hero 25-27).

ful hero ornaments his city (XXII .435) […] – but a man does not win kudos for ano-ther . Kleos, by contrast, is won by the war-rior both for himself and his father (VI.446, VIII .285) . Kudos belongs only to the living; kleos also to the dead . Kudos is frequently a gift from a god; kleos is won by the man himself or granted by the folk. Kudos be-longs only to men, kleos also to women . Kudos is always positive; success brings kudos, failure merely penthos, “sorrow” (IV.416-17). […] The successful man feels that he matters more to others, and this feeling is his kudos, […] . Kleos, however, is in the keeping of others; a man’s kleos consists of what others say about him. Since they may speak of his failures as well as of his success, failure also has a kleos – negative kleos, duskleia (II .115 = IX .22) . Timē is bestowed to a man by others, but a man’s timē is a valuation of him, while his kleos is a description . Timē means “honor” and also “status,” especially the status of the king (VI .193, IX .616, XX181) […]. Obviously men’s timē fluctuated, and a man who had kudos would also have a greater timē (XVI.84). But kudos is an ab-solute quality, like health or strength, while timē is always relative: it is a measure of men’s standing in relation to one another (I .278, XXIV .57) . […] Kleos is thus a specific type of so cial identity . […] His [a man’s] story is in a certain sense himself – or one version of himself – and, since his story can sur vive his personal existence and survive his enactment of a social role, his story is from one point of view the most real version of himself . […] Thus the kleos of the hero is to some extent a compensation to him for his own destruction. (Redfield 32-34)

This paper will focus on the kλέος of Homeric heroes as roughly defined in the last paragraph of my quotation of Redfield’s discussion and de-velop an idea on how this kλέος could be con-ceived of visually, and how it could be visually opposed to and related to other (non-Homeric) conceptions of it. As has become apparent, kλέος is in itself a complex concept and needs to be narrowed down further for the purpose of my inquiry . It is therefore necessary to ask which form of kλέος the Homeric heroes are primarily concerned with . In Iliad 11, 218-228 we learn of the fate of one Iphidamas:

Tell me now you Muses dwelling on Olym-pus, | who was the first to come up and face Agamemnon, | either among the Tro-jans or among their famous allies? | It was Iphidamas son of Antenor, a man both

Martin Dorka Moreno

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kλέος on the Sosias Cup

equipped with a suit of armour and helmet, but without combat weapons, is tending to a wound suffered by Patroklos, on the left, on his left upper arm (fig. 1). The wound was caused by an arrow which is shown in the lower left of the image . Patroklos has turned his head away, sup-posedly in pain and gritting his white-coloured teeth: the pain literally seems to set his teeth on edge. He has taken off his helmet, his body ar-mour is loosened on the left shoulder; the epau-let is folded up, so that the wound can be prop-erly dressed . He sits on a round shield on which a tripod is depicted, tightening his right leg while stretching the left all the way to the rounded line that forms the right border of the image. This poise leads to a prominent display of Patroklos’ genitals . The depiction is fascinating for its rich detail: lines of various strength differentiate the warriors’ faces and bodies. Different ornaments and patterns are used to emphasise their suits of armour and transparent (!) garments: A close r look at the latter reveals that the painter also subtly depicted Achilles’ genital area. The whole scene is elevated above floral ornaments and a trapezoid beam. – Achilles is tending to his com-panion Patroklos’ wound: the scene is singular in the visual arts and has no literary precursor .12 The outside surface of the cup on each side of the handles is decorated with a wide array of figures, and again almost all of them are identi-fied by inscriptions (fig. 2 and fig. 3) .13 Beneath one of the handles a round disc is depicted, which shows the head of Selene, the goddess of the moon . On one side, from right to left, Her-akles is accompanied by Athena, Artemis and Hermes . An inscription right next to his head reads Zεû φíλε, Zeu phíle, ‘dear Zeus’. Herak-les is greeting Zeus. An unidentifiable goddess and Hestia sit facing in the opposite direction of Herakles, as do all other figures on this side, ex-cepting Hermes, who has turned his head back to Herakles. This scene is closed off by two of the Horae, goddesses of the seasons . On the other side, which is only partially preserved, we see Dionysos with an unidentifiable goddess as well as Ares and Aphrodite, and directly facing Hera and Zeus on the very left, Amphitrite and Poseidon . All the gods and Herakles, except for Hermes, are shifting their attention to Hera and Zeus, who, in turn, shift their attention in the di-rection of Herakles . The topic depicted here is Herakles’ introduction to Olympos in the pres-ence of the gods;14 in honour of Herakles’ arrival they are pouring libations out of shallow cups, so-called Phialae . The Sosias Cup and its imagery have not been the subject of intense scholarly debate; especially differentiated approaches to link its in-side and outside imagery are not precisely a dime a dozen .15 Klaus Junker, however, in two recent

These introductory remarks were meant to pave the way for my subsequent interpretation of the imagery of the so-called Sosias Cup. I do not intend to force visual culture into a subordinate position vis-à-vis literary culture: The literary concepts of honour/glory/fame, especially of the Homeric kλέος ἄφθιτον as a form of social iden-tity discussed above, however, might be instruct-ive for an analysis of how images speak about these concepts .

Achilles, Patroklos, and Herakles on the Sosias Cup

The so-called Sosias Cup, an Attic red-figure drinking-cup, is a κύλιξ, kylix, a cup with a broad, relatively shallow body raised on a stem from a round, often moulded foot with two horizontal symmetrical handles on each side . It was found in Vulci, Italy, in the Necropolis of Camposcala and thus in a funerary context .9 The cup, how-ever, was imported from Athens, where it was made roughly around the turn of the sixth to the fifth century BC. The almost flat interior circle on the interior base of the cup, as well as the outside surface between the two handles, were used as a surface for painted decoration . The kylix in question is attributed to the so-called Sosias Painter. An inscription on the stem gives away the name of the potter: ΣΟΣΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΣΕΝ (sosias epoíesen, ‘Sosias made [it]’), and since we cannot be sure that the potter Sosias, who made the cup, was also the painter, scholarship has – as in many cases – resorted to the solution to call the painter the Sosias-Paint-er, i.e. the painter that painted the cup made by Sosias.10 The kylix is about 10 cm high. The in-ner, circular picture has a diameter of 17 .5 cm; the diameter of the whole cup is 32 cm . In principle, three contexts for the usage of such a drinking-cup are possible: first and fore-most, the symposion, a social gathering of men where wine would be consumed; second, a fu-nerary context, in which it would have played a role in the burial festivities, and, lastly, such a cup could have functioned as a votive in a sanc-tuary where it would have been dedicated to a certain deity (cf . Junker, Symposiongeschirr oder Totengefäße). The first and second contexts of usage are relevant for the Sosias Cup: It was found in a funerary context (in Italy), but its form and function invariably suggest that it was made (in Athens) with the intention of serving as a drink-ing-cup and so, preferably, in a sympotic context. Inside the flat interior a circular image shows the two Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroklos – their names are given by inscriptions11 – involved in a conspicuous situation: Achilles, on the right,

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dying a warrior’s death . Instead, one might ar-gue, an imagery that so explicitly shows them vulnerable and in a near-death situation, implicit-ly tries to hint at their kλέος ἄφθιτον, the poem or song of their glory and fame which will make them imperishable by the means of “the immor-talizing power” of kλέος (Nagy, Greek Hero 31; as cited above). To this end, then, the imagery would speak explicitly about a positive outcome to a precarious situation, while implicit ly positive-ly anticipating the heroes’ immortality in song which they can only achieve by dying.22 The op-position between positive momentary outcome and negative ending breaks down because the latter is simply not part of the concept of heroes such as Achilles and Patroklos, nor is it part of others, such as freshly married Iphi damas . Death itself is not the heroes’ concern but rather dying the right way; this is what Nagy significant-ly calls “the need for heroes to script their own death” (Nagy, Greek Hero 32-33; cf. Shapiro, Hêrôs Theos, 1983) . Consequently, there might not be a positive versus negative opposition between the imagery of the inner circular image and the decoration on the outside surface, as proposed by Junker, but – more generally speaking – a comparison between two forms of, or oscillating concepts of ‘glory, fame, that which is heard’, kλέος, and the ways of obtaining it (Nagy, Greek Hero 27; as cite d above). This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that the imagery of the outside surface of the cup unambiguously speaks about a hero’s kλέος, since it relates Herakles’ introduction to Olympos . And Herakles’ name “means he who has the kleos of Hera” (Nagy, Greek Hero 33) . Herakles, son of Zeus and Alkmene, was like the latter, his mother, a mortal. His labours, through which he gets his kλέος, singularise him as a hero who has to go to his limits while being under constraint to do so. Herakles’ deeds are challenges given to him by an external order, namely by Eurystheus, the mythological king of Mycenae and Tiryns. They are not self-imposed. Herakles earns his kλέος through the comple-tion of his labours, which would never have been performed if Hera, by intervention, had not made Herakles an unseasonal, incidental hero by being born after rather than before his cousin Eurystheus, precisely the mythological king under whose orders Herakles has to perform his labours. So, Herakles owes his kλέος to his labours, which he, however, had to perform out of this unseasonal incident caused by Hera, and his name attests to that . Hera’s name, in turn, ref-erences her function as the goddess of seasons: She is in charge of making everything happen on time, happen in a timely way (Nagy, Greek Hero 42-46). Herakles’ kλέος, which is unambiguously

thorough discussions, has argued that the in-ner picture evidently and explicitly speaks about friendship and humanity in times of crisis as well as about an ideal and unconditional military dedi-cation of the two warriors Patroklos and Achilles in times of war, while implicitly, and precise ly by only swiftly touching upon the mortal ity, or ra-ther the vulnerability of the two heroes, vis ually antici pating their deaths .16 The injury of Patro-klos, Junker argues, suggests his and Achilles’ death s by ostensibly evoking a genuine ly posi-tive situation, which then, by the means of a vis-ual rhetoric of irony, evokes exactly the negative opposite .17 The image, in conclusion, opposes mili tary excellence with a near-death experience, and by extension of the latter, with death itself.18

This interpretation, with which I am in accord-ance, leads Junker to conclude that the image conveys a differentiated idea of mankind by extrapolating an appellative message that has at its core the notion or moral ethic directed at young Athenian men, who, as the historical con-text in late Archaic times suggests, must have been familiar with the threat of war or war-like situations: that they should not go to war with-out being fully aware of the fatal consequences that decision may entail . Achilles and Patroklos, Junker states, two of the most accomplished and praised heroes of the Iliad, are shown as un-heroic, vulnerable, in need of protection, and are, thus, meant to serve as exempla according-ly .19 The imagery of the outside, which Junker discusses only swiftly, opposes this anticipated fatal and negative outcome with the positive end of a strenuous life, exemplified by Herakles, who was granted immortality by the gods.20

Two Types of (Getting) kλέος

I do not intend to contradict Junker’s basic inter-pretation, but would like to extend it by offering a different perspective on precisely what the ap-pellative messages of the imagery of the Sosias Cup – if one wants to strongly conceptualise the images of Greek vases in that way, as op-posed to think of them as Interpretationsange-bote, offers for interpretation, in which appella-tive messages could have played a role in as far as they provided the basis for negotiation and discussion – may have been more prominently concerned with .21

By the virtue of the attitudes of the Homeric heroes, their specific form of heroism, and their obsession with the concept of kλέος and kλέος ἄφθιτον as evidenced in the Iliad, Achilles and Patroklos are hardly suitable figures to commu-nicate cautionary tales about the possibility of

Martin Dorka Moreno

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kλέος on the Sosias Cup

1 This paper has benefitted from comments by the partici-pants of the Freiburg colloquium. In addition Barbara Korte, Ralf von den Hoff, Alexander Heinemann, Martin Kovacs, Antonia Rüth, Andrew Stewart, and Maribel Dorka Moreno have provided substantial help by discussing my thoughts with me . This paper, however, remains a sketch in many ways . I intend to engage in a more detailed study on the imagery of the so-called Sosias Cup, and on the concepts of honour/glory/fame and how they were visually conceived of in Attic vase painting, in the near future .

2 The translations are taken from the Lidell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon: 20 July 2015 <http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/>. For the translation of κûδος as ‘charismatic splendor’ and kλέος as ‘the poem or song that conveys glory, fame, that which is heard’ I have resorted to Scodel and, as mentioned above, to Nagy, Greek Hero, 26 respectively . The latter’s discussion of “The ‘Meaning of Kleos’” in his chapter on “The Homeric Iliad and the Glory of the Unseasonal Hero” has stimulated much of what follows .

3 My account of the philological scholarship on these os-cillating concepts has to be brief and selective due to the conceptual character of this paper . For further discussions of the terms tιμή, κûδος, kλέος – which almost every inquiry in Homeric poetry touches upon, see for example Nagy, Achae-ans 1979, Pucci 1998, and, focussing almost exclusively and most instructively on Achilles, King 1987 .

4 For the definition of heroism as “a system of internalised patterns”, and, thus, as a habitus, see von den Hoff et al. 8.

5 Cultural anthropology’s, in particular Ruth Benedict’s insights into so-called guilt cultures, or, as an alternative, so-called shame cultures, in which social control is created by guilt and shame respectively, might be valuable in this respect, and, as is the case with the oscillating concepts of tιμή, κûδος, kλέος, warrant closer attention than is possible here. See Benedict, who develops her ideas on the basis of Japanese culture, as well as Dodds for a sharp distinction between guilt and shame cultures and the implementation of the concept in Greek culture . The historian of Greek art almost immediately has to think of an Attic black-figure am-phora attributed to the painter Exekias from around 530/525 BC. It depicts Ajax preparing his own death: The hero adjusts his sword on the ground to make it stand upwards; he has taken off his armour which is leaning, neatly arranged, on the right image border. In an instant Ajax will literally fall into his own sword . His decision to kill himself is the result of the fact that, driven mad with rage and blinded by Athena, he has ravaged a sheep herd instead of practicing revenge on his Greek companions, namely Agamemnon and Menelaos . Witness the interplay of αἰδώς and τιμή in full effect. (Exekias’ Amphora: Boulogne-sur-Mer, Château-Musée Inv. Nr. 558. – Beazley ABV 145.18: Exekias; Beazley Para 60. For an ex-tensive bibliography and photographical documentation: 15 July 2015 <www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/938261A0-F0AA-4125-931E-1A62F73778C6>. Cf. LIMC (1981) Nr. 104* 328 s . v . Aias I (O . Touchefeu); see ibid. Nr. 103; 105-109; and 312-314 for a through discussion of the literary evidence.)

6 ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι ὅς τις δὴ πρῶτος Ἀγαμέμνονος ἀντίον ἦλθεν ἢ αὐτῶν Τρώων ἠὲ κλειτῶν ἐπικούρων. Ἰφιδάμας Ἀντηνορίδης ἠΰς τε μέγας τε ὃς τράφη ἐν Θρῄκῃ ἐριβώλακι μητέρι μήλων: Κισσῆς τόν γ᾽ ἔθρεψε δόμοις ἔνι τυτθὸν ἐόντα μητροπάτωρ, ὃς τίκτε Θεανὼ καλλιπάρῃον: αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾽ ἥβης ἐρικυδέος ἵκετο μέτρον, αὐτοῦ μιν κατέρυκε, δίδου δ᾽ ὅ γε θυγατέρα ἥν: γήμας δ᾽ ἐκ θαλάμοιο μετὰ κλέος ἵκετ᾽ Ἀχαιῶν σὺν δυοκαίδεκα νηυσὶ κορωνίσιν, αἵ οἱ ἕποντο. (Nagy Greek Hero, 29) .

7 μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλος δέ. εἰ μέν κ᾽ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι, ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται: εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδ᾽ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα

evoked in the image of the so-called Sosias Cup, is thus distinctively different from Achilles’ and Patroklos’ kλέος ἄφθιτον, or the kλέος ἄφθιτον of the warrior heroes of the Homeric Iliad in general . Herakles does not consciously decide to die, and his death is not in the same sense the prerequisite for his kλέος, for his inclusion in song and poetry, which in Greek song culture has an immortalising power, and his apothe-osis and intro duction to Olympos are ra ther unforeseeable benefits from his strenuous life. So, to return to the drinking cup, one might theorise that it is the juxtaposition of these two conceptions of kλέος which the imagery of the cup relates. Extending on the general interpret-ation offered by Junker, I would contend that for the young Athenian man who looks at the image s, there are two perspectives offered on how to obtain kλέος and, thus, honour and glory: One is to obtain it through hard labour and the positive will and intervention of the gods, un-ambiguously exemplified by Herakles, a hero who is close to the gods, as he is literally just a few steps away from Zeus and accompanied by others. However, as the example suggests, much of the capability to achieve this goal is left to chance, including the tasks that you are given . Let alone that it might be a prerequisite that one has to be at least half of divine descent. Another possibility is – to a certain degree – to take mat-ters into one’s own hands and decide to go to war and engage in conflict, knowing that (like for Achilles and Patroklos who are shown isolated and distant from the gods) – death will do the trick and secure comparable kλέος ἄφθιτον. One might, in advancing a strong appellative character of images such as those on the so-called Sosias Cup, argue that to draw level with Herakles, Achilles and Patroklos was virtually impossible. Such objections, however, would go right against the grain of what myth meant in Greek culture . Greek myths were, to quote Walter Burkert’s sensible dictum, traditional nar-ratives with special significance (“traditionelle Erzählungen mit besonderer Bedeutsamkeit”).23 Written, told, performed, or visualised, they pre-sented interpretational offers that, in specific cultural contexts such as the symposion or in fu neral practices, could enhance the individ-ual’s as well as the collective’s attitudes towards specific cultural settings – including different and oscillating categories of glory, honour and fame .

Martin Dorka Moreno is a research associate in project B1 of the Collaborative Research Center 948 at the University of Freiburg and is current-ly working on his dissertation Imitatio Alexandri in Images of Gods and Heroes in Greco- Roman Antiquity .

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the latter “loosening the limbs” of the victim, a term which signifies nothing else than the atony of the dead body. In Il. 16 . 314, for example, we learn of how Menealos kills one Thoas: “First the valiant son of Menoetius smote the thigh of Areilycus with a cast of his sharp spear at the moment when he turned to flee, and drave the bronze clean through; [310] and the spear brake the bone, and he fell on his face on the ground . And warlike Menelaus thrust and smote Thoas on the breast, where it was left bare beside the shield, and loosed his limbs.” A digital search in the Iliad on http://www .hup .harvard .edu yields seven more results for the col-location: Il . 4 . 465; 7 . 5; 11 . 240; 11 . 260; 16 . 16; 16 . 310; 21 . 405 . Patroklos’ poise, although the phrase is not direct-ly associated with his death, might – as has been intuited inter alia by Simon – allude to him losing the control over his limbs in a similar, anticipating manner. Second, the in-ner, circular image is considered a watershed in the tech-nique of Greek vase painting. The painter has for the first time while depicting figures from the side painted the eyes in profile instead of showing them, as it was practice, seen from the front . Interestingly enough, the painter did not follow through with this new technique on the very same cup: the eyes of the figures on the outside, remarkably except for the figure of Ares, have eyes that are painted from the front with the pupils only slightly displaced to the left or right . Although the revolutionary painting technique has frequently been no-ticed, its potential to add something to the understanding of the cup’s imagery on an interpretational level has not been explored. If one takes such formal similarities (or differences, respectively) serious and does not pawn them off as mere aesthetical gimmicks, then there is potential here for seman-tics . At the risk of gilding the lily, the equality of the eyes of Achilles and Patroklos ‘solely’ with Ares is suspicious, to say the least, when one considers that Homeric heroes are, and specifically Patroklos is, called atalantos Arēi, equal to Ares, in relation to their/his death(s): Il. 11. 599-606; cf. Nagy, Greek Hero 157-162.

19 In this respect, Nikolaus Himmelmann’s idea of the “hero-isches Genre”, the heroic genre, is intriguingly instructive and warrants further discussion; Himmelmann, Herakles 87-121.

20 See Junker, Pseudo-Homerica 8 and Junker, Mythen-bilder 22 .

21 I want to emphasise that the perspective I will develop is not conceived as a total antagonism to Junker’s hypothesis, although it may appear to be precisely that. What I intend to make plausible is another reading of the imagery. In fact, some of Junker’s arguments remain convincing and pose a threat to my own hypothesis, for instance the notion that in late sixth-century Athens a discourse existed that prima vista was negatively concerned with the prospect of not re-turning home from war, which Junker sees evidenced by the depictions of the anonymous Kriegerabschied, the farewell of anonymous warriors, which could be combined with the Leichenbergung, the recovery of a dead warrior’s body by a companion. See Junker, Mythenbilder 26 with fig. 4 and 5.

22 Cf. Nagy, Greek Hero 31, who in 1§22 and 1§23 says: “In the culture represented by the heroes of the Iliad, the distinc-tion [...] between the artificial and the natural is not the same as in our modern cultures . Their culture was a song culture [...]. In a song culture, [...], the artificial can be just as real the words of natural speech in a real-life experience. In a song culture, the song can be just as real as life itself. In ancient Greek song culture, the tale or story of the Iliad was felt to be not only real but also true. [...], the Homeric Iliad was felt to con-vey ultimate truth-values of the ancient Greek song culture.”

23 Burkert, Paradigma Roms 1-24 and Burkert, Antiker Mythos 11-26. Cf. Kirk 1978; Dowden 1992; Buxton 1994; Steinhart 16-20.

γαῖαν, ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μ᾽ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη.(Nagy Greek Hero, 27) .

8 Nagy, Greek Hero, 29 . One might argue, however, that kλέος is not a “consolation prize”, as Nagy states, since it does not evoke a negative sentiment, but a positive one to begin with.

9 Berlin, Antikensammlung Inv. Nr. F 2278. – Beazley ARV2 21, 1. 1620: Sosias-Painter; Beazley Para 323; CVA Ber-lin (2) Taf. 49-51; LIMC I (1981) Nr. 468* 115 s. v. Achilleus (A. Kossatz-Deissmann). – Selective bibliography: Himmel-mann, Götterversammlung; Simon 102 Taf. 117; Pinney 135; Lowenstam 184-185; Wehgartner; Junker, Pseudo-Homeri-ca 2-8; Junker, Mythenbilder 13-27, passim; Hedreen 45-47; Steinhart 6-7 fig. 3; Shapiro, Olympian Gods, 410-412. For a full photographical documentation of the Cup and a more ex-tensive bibliography: 10 July 2015 <www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/2E23511B-953D-4807-86A8-7126BB40FAFF> .

10 The Œuvre of the so-called Sosias Painter, as identified by scholarship, is relatively small: cf. Beazley ARV2 21, 2 (10 July 2015 <www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/A36A874C-3070-43D2-993A-C5B051BB3253>); and Beazley ARV2 21. (10 July 2015 <www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/79A6DAB7-D402-4BF1-ACC1-4217BDF427FE> [“recalls the Sosias Paint-er”]); and Beazley ARV2. (10 July 2015 <www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/F7579488-C772-4FC6-8AD6-666DCB90BF98> [“recalls the Sosias Painter”]).

11 For a detailed reproduction of inscriptions, see: CVA Ber-lin (2) 7 .

12 Achilles and Patroklos in the visual arts: LIMC (1981) Nr. 466-505 115-121 s. v. Patroklos (A. Kossatz-Deissmann). On the discussions of the (absent) literary precursors, see, most conveniently, Junker, Pseudo-Homerica 3-4.

13 For a detailed reproduction of inscriptions, see: CVA Ber-lin (2) 7-9.

14 Herakles’ death and apotheosis in the visual arts: LIMC V (1990) Nr. 2847-2938 122-131 s. v. Herakles (J. Board-man). Cf. Brinkmann.

15 The present discussion is limited to the central issues discussed with regards to the content of the imagery by Klaus Junker, who has hitherto – to my knowledge – pro-vided the most detailed analysis .

16 Junker, Pseudo-Homerica 2–8 and Junker, Mythenbilder 13–27, passim. Junker’s basic interpretation extends on Lowenstam; see my comments in what is to follow .

17 Junker, Pseudo-Homerica 5: “Achill stellt für einen Mo-ment die Gesundheit des Patroklos wieder her, doch wird er, wie jeder Mythenkundige weiß, dessen Tod nicht aufhalten können. Patroklos und Achill selbst werden bald danach im Kampf sterben.”

18 Junker extends his basic argumentation by bringing forth further arguments, which, in the present context, I can only densely summarise: The tripod on Patroklos’ shield, which he sits upon, is an attribute of Apollo, who is – by interfer-ing in battle – responsible for Patroklos’ and Achilles’ death. See, tentatively, Junker, Pseudo-Homerica 7; Il . 19 . 416f; 22 . 358-360. In addition, Patroklos’ poise and him ‘not’ wearing his full armour might be alluding to the circumstances of his death in Il . 16 . 820f: Apollo loosens his armour, so Patrok-los is fully exposed and gets killed by Hektor; notably Hek-tor “smote him with a thrust of his spear in the nethermost belly, and drave the bronze clean through”. The “nethermost belly” is precisely what Patroklos’ poise exposes. Ibid., cf. Heinemann 45-49. And lastly, depictions of Patroklos in the sixth and until the end of the fifth century BC almost exclu-sively are associated with his death; ibid. – I would like to add two observations, which are, however, preliminary at best and warrant further examination: First, in the Iliad the killing of a warrior by another is frequently described as

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Junker, Klaus. “Symposiongeschirr oder Totengefäße? Über-legungen zur Funktion attischer Vasen des 6 . und 5 . Jahr-hunderts v . Chr .” Antike Kunst 45 (2002): 3-25.

---. Pseudo-Homerica. Kunst und Epos im spätarchaischen Athen . 141 . Winckelmannsprogramm der Archäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin. Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2003 .

---. Griechische Mythenbilder: Eine Einführung in ihre Inter-pretation. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2005.

King, Catherine C . Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987 .

Kirk, Geoffrey S. The Nature of Greek Myths. Harmonds-worth: Penguin Books, 1978.

Lowenstam, Stephen. “The Uses of Vase-Depictions in Hom-eric Studies”, Transactions American Philological Associ-ation 122 (1992): 165-198.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

---. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Harvard: UP, 2013.

Pinney Ferrari, Gloria. “Achilles Lord of Scythia.” Ancient Greek Art and Iconography . Ed . Warren G . Moon . Wiscon-sin: UP, 1983: 127-146.

Pucci, Pietro . The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Redfield, James M. Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tra-gedy of Hector. Chicago: UP, 1975.

Scodel, Ruth. Epic Facework: Self-Presentation and Social Interaction in Homer. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2008 .

Shapiro, H. Allan. “‘Hêroôs Theos’: The Death and Apothe-osis of Herakles .” The Classical World 77.1 (1983): 7-18.

---. “Olympian Gods at Home and Abroad.” A Companion to Greek Art. Volume 2. Eds. Tyler Jo Smith and Dimitris Plantzos. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012: 399-413.

Simon, Erika. Die griechischen Vasen. Munich: Hirmer, 1976 .

Steinhart, Matthias. “The Razor’s Edge: Heroes in Danger in Early Fifth-Century Attic Vase Red-Figure Vase-Painting.” An Archaeology of Representations. Ed. Dimitrios Yatro-manolakis. Athens: Institute du Livre, 2009: 1-24.

von den Hoff, Ralf, et al. “Helden – Heroisierungen – Hero-ismen: Transformationen und Konjunkturen von der Anti-ke bis zur Moderne: Konzeptionelle Ausgangspunkte des Sonderforschungsbereichs 948”, helden. heroes. héros. E-Journal zu Kulturen des Heroischen 1.1 (2013): 7-14. DOI 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2013/01/03.

Wehgartner, Irma. “59: Schale (Typus B).“ Euphronios der Maler. Ausstellungskatalog, Antikenmuseum Berlin, Staat-liche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Milan: Fabbri edito-ri, 1991: 244-249.

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---. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963 .

---. Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Paint-ers and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1971 .

Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysantemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Mifflin, 1946.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974.

Burkert, Walter. “Mythos – Begriff, Struktur, Funktionen.” Mythe n in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms. Ed. Fritz Graf. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991: 1-24.

---. “Antiker Mythos – Begriff und Funktion.” Antike Mythen in der europäischen Tradition. Ed. Heinz Hofmann. Tübingen: Attempto-Verlag, 1999: 11-26.

Buxton, Richard G.A. Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology. Cambridge: UP, 1994.

Brinkmann, Vinzenz. “Der Tod des Helden auf dem Scheiter-haufen und seine Himmelfahrt zu den Göttern.” Herakles – Herkules. Ed. Raimund Wünsche. Munich: Staatliche An-tikensammlungen und Glyptothek, 2003: 282-286.

--- “Unter Göttern.” Herakles – Herkules . Ed . Raimund Wün-sche. Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glypto-thek, 2003: 306-311.

Dodds, Eric R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: U of California P, 1951 .

Dowden, Ken. The Uses of Greek Mythology . London: Rout-ledge, 1992 .

Greifenhagen, Adolf . Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, CVA Deutschland, Berlin, Antiquarium, Band 2 . Munich: C . H . Beck, 1962.

Hedreen, Guy. “Achilles beyond the Iliad.” Heroes: Mortals and Myth in Ancient Greece. Ed. Sabine Albersmeier. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009: 39-48.

Heinemann, Alexander. “Ungleiche Festgenossen: Spät-archaische Gelagegemeinschaften im Medium der Va-senmalerei .” Rollenbilder in der athenischen Demokratie: Medie n, Gruppen, Räume im politischen und sozialen Sys-tem. Eds . Christian Mann, Mathias Haake, and Ralf von den Hoff. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2009: 35-70.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus. “Die Götterversammlung der Sosias- Schale”, Marburger Winckelmann-Programm 1960 . Marburg: Verlag des kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars, 1960: 41-48.

---. Der ausruhende Herakles. Nordrhein-Westfälische Aka-demie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Vorträge G 420. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009.

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fig. 1: So-Called Sosias Cup, Interior: Achilles (on the right) tending to a wound suffered by Patroklos (on the left). (Photo: Bibi Saint-Pol. 2 August 2015 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Akhilleus_Patroklos_Antikensammlung_Berlin_F2278.jpg>).

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fig. 2: So-Called Sosias Cup, Exterior: Herakles’ introduction to Olympos in the presence of the gods. (After Furtwängler, Adolf. Griechische Vasenmalerei: Auswahl hervorragender Vasenbilder 3. Munich: Bruckmann,1932. Pl. 123).

fig. 3: So-Called Sosias Cup, Exterior: Herakles’ introduction to Olympos in the presence of the gods. (After Furtwängler, Adolf. Griechische Vasenmalerei: Auswahl hervorragender Vasenbilder 3. Munich: Bruckmann,1932. Pl. 123).

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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2016/QMR/05

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new perspective on embassies and political commu-nication in imperial cities in the fifteenth century. It will focus on two different sources for an en-voy’s motivation to perform his duty: an internal-ised sense of honour and a reputation which was assigned by others. First I will introduce Nördlin-gen, the city which I am using as my case study, and its council . With the help of an example, the second part positions my project in relation to previous scholarship . The third part explains how the common good was one possible motiv-ating factor for an envoy to accomplish his duty conscientiously, and finally I will describe how the envoys were seen as experts and how this enhanced their reputation .

Nördlingen: City and Council

The city of Nördlingen, its foreign affairs and its envoys, can serve as a model for smaller German imperial towns: With 6,000 to 8,000 inhabitants, fifteenth-century Nördlingen was average-sized and, based on its own political networks, can be seen as a sub-centre in the network of the south-ern German imperial cities (cf. Bátori 86; Frieß). In addition, the written records, the council files, and accounts are well preserved in the archives and provide the researcher with rich source ma-terial . Nördlingen first appears in a ninth-century charter. It officially became an imperial town in 1235, which means that it answered directly to the Emperor. Nevertheless, throughout its his-tory, Nördlingen always had to fight for its auton-omy because it was surrounded by princedoms who sought to integrate it into their dominions . One result of this permanent struggle was a heightened sense of self-esteem within the gov-ernment (cf. Kudorfer 135-140). Nördlingen’s councilmen were active members of the Swa-bian Alliance of Towns, and they frequently acted as the alliance’s spokespersons . Its economic importance added to the town’s self-confidence.

In particular, Nördlingen had a great annual mar-ket of supra-regional importance – a trade fair (cf. Kießling 84-87, 107). This provided the basis for the town’s political development. During the 1260s a new political and social structure arose when, along with the commune, a permanent council was formed . It consisted of twelve coun-cilmen who all belonged to the trading elite. In the early fourteenth century, the guilds became much more powerful so that the council had to be reformed. Under the umbrella of the newl y established Great Council, two sub-councils were established: the original council, hence-forth known as the Old Council, and the newly founded Guild’s Council (cf. Bátori 89-90). The Old Council replaced two of its mem-bers each year. Therefore, while a great part of its members still came from the upper class for a long time, the boundaries between the upper class and the guildsmen were permeable and, by the fifteenth century at the latest, several for-mer master craftsmen gained access to the Old Council (cf. ibid.). However, it must be pointed out that the lower and poorer craftsmen were not the ones to benefit from this new situation; in fact, the rich craftsmen gained the majority in the Old Council as well as in the Guild’s Council (cf. Brenner 58-59). Because of the shared inter-ests of these two interconnected groups, for-eign affairs were discussed in both councils. In practice, however, envoys were exclusively dis-patched by the Old Council (cf. Bátori 89). These envoys were considered experts in foreign af-fairs and essential for the town’s communication and information politics . Envoys represented the council at various political forums and were held responsible for their own diplomatic missions (cf. Jörg 52-53). The envoys acted as a link between their council and their missions’ addressees, such as the German Emperor or the Swabian Al-liance of Towns . Furthermore, they were agents within this communication process and used this position to further their own political ambitions within the town’s political structure .

The Envoy’s Honour and Reputation in Fifteenth-Century Urban Diplomacy

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who had the relevant news and first-hand infor-mation, and he himself decided how to proceed on his mission. As will be shown in the following section, there were two major motivations for the envoys to act so independently: on the one hand their obligation to act in accordance with the common good, and on the other hand their status as experts .

Common Spirit and the Envoy’s Professional Honour

The council and citizenry expected the envoy to be committed to the common good of his home city. The envoys made great efforts to preserve the honour and well-being of their council and city, and to maintain its safety, legal capacity and economic capability (cf. Rogge 46-47; Rublack 30-31). Furthering their own reputation through their service was merely a welcome side- effect. Even though there are no autobiographic-al docu ments which would give us information about the personal attitude of an envoy, there are indications that improving one’s own reputa-tion was not the exclusive motive for his efforts. The social system of Nördlingen had mechan-isms to ensure that the envoys had an internal-ised sense of honour . As in most other imperial towns, Nördlingen’s citizens swore the Burgher’s Oath once a year, on Monday before Whitsun, the so-called Schwörtag. The oath (established in 1450) emphasised loyalty, friendship, unity and peace .6 In addition, the mayors and coun-cilmen vowed a separate oath in which the mayors committed themselves firmly to the com-mon good,7 and the councilmen swore to be loya l and to make fair, conscientious judgements .8 The council regulations of 1480 even start with a theological justification of the council’s authority, which adds gravity to the responsibility of act-ing honourably.9 The periodic renewal of these oaths helped to ensure stability within the city and served as a mechanism of integration that furthered the affiliation between city and council. Furthermore, the oath-takers were encouraged to internalise the moral concepts of the oaths through their annual repetition . The envoys’ second motivation was his ex-pertise and know-how. My thesis focuses not on diplomacy from the perspective of progress but on diplomacy as an evolving and consolidating culture of expertise and thus on its experienced agents, the envoys. But what is an expert? Frank Rexroth describes the expert as a type, a social model, one who – in a situation of communi-cation – distinguishes himself or herself from others by having the relevant knowledge at hand (cf . Rexroth 22) .10 I apply this understanding of

Jeronimus von Bopfingen: Puppet or Expert?

The interpretation of the role of the envoy out-lined above is different from that usually present-ed in the traditional literature . In order to clarify my argument and position it within extant re-search on late-medieval urban envoys, I will use an example: On 17 November 1440 the envoy Jeronimus von Bopfingen wrote a letter to his councilmen colleagues . In this letter he appears troubled and confused. In the war between Earl Johann of Oettingen and the Swabian Alliance of Towns, he was not only the envoy of Nördlin-gen but also an advisor to the commanding of-ficers. The war had started cumbersomely and made the mercenaries resentful . Even when the Alliance’s forces were able to carry some of the enemy’s positions, this did not change the atmosphere of battle fatigue. Nördlingen’s mer-cenaries were no longer willing to continue the fight.1 At first glance, Jeronimus appeared help-less. The commanding officers insisted upon continuing the war; the mercenaries insisted on dropping out. In order to buy himself some time, Jeronimus told the commanding officers that he was not authorised to proceed and that he had to talk to his council first. Consequent-ly he wrote the letter mentioned above in which he explained his woes to the council and asked for further instruction . It appears that he want-ed to deny all accountability. He warned his colleagues that abandoning the Alliance would cast a damning light on Nördlingen for which he did not want to take responsibility.2 According to this reading, it is perhaps not surprising that the older research tradition, strongly influenced by the ideas of Prussian diplomacy, considered small-town envoys to be puppets of the Council.3 Contrary to the findings of this older research literature and drawing on the most recent ap-proaches,4 I consider envoys as reputable ex-perts for foreign affairs and will offer an alterna-tive interpretation of the situation . Jeronimus von Bopfingen had no other choice but to ask for official instruction. Since the campaign had been a disaster from the very beginning, it was not easy to retain Nördlingen’s mercenaries, which was necessary if Jeronimus wanted to save his honour with regard to his function as advisor to the commanding officers. Writing his letter actually meant buying time. Jeronimus was aware of rumours that other cities were about to withdraw their mercenaries.5 Accordingly his letter was more a warning about the low morale of the Alliance and less of a call for help . Jeronimus was experienced in dealing with very different interest groups and under-stood the power of self-staging. He was the one

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The Envoy’s Honour and Reputation in Fifteenth-Century Urban Diplomacy

also strongly affected by the merchants and craftsmen . They gained their reputation from a more practical knowledge of economic struc-tures and trade connections .12 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this knowledge was per-sonal as well. However, it blended gradually into the expertise of the upper-class councilmen and transformed into an expert knowledge with re-gard to the council . Third, even though being an envoy was not a profession during the fifteenth century, there are noticeable traces of institutionalisation. In the first third of the fifteenth century envoys acquired their skills mostly by trial and error – not the most efficient way of training. However, by the last third of the century the council had established, albeit not formally, a kind of proto-apprentice-ship. More specifically, an embassy consisted of at least one experienced envoy and a relative-ly inexperienced one . The senior envoy passed his knowledge on to the junior envoy, who thus learned the most important rules and procedures of diplomacy and adopted the correct habitus (cf. Rexroth 22-24).13 He could build up his person-al network of contacts, take part in negotiations and, in short, experience the progress of a dip-lomatic mission. Beyond that he could contribute his own knowledge to the council’s accumulated expertise .

Concluding Remark

To come full circle, the envoy Jeronimus is indeed a good example for the development described. He was a respected elite council member and a noted, long-term envoy who acted honourably on behalf of his council and home city. His repu-tation was based on his expert knowledge, which derived from two sources . First, his knowledge was handed down in a family that counted many councilmen, envoys and several mayors among its ranks. Second, Jeronimus was a former mer-cenary in the Hussite Wars (1419-1434/39), where he gained considerable practical experi-ence in foreign affairs and a high standing. At first he represented the council at various pol-itical forums, such as the Emperor’s Court or the Alliance of Towns where he distinguished himself by acting prudently in Nördlingen’s inter-ests . Later in his career, however, the council en-trusted him almost exclusively with embassies to the Court of the Emperor, and he became one of Nördlingen’s first expert envoys. During this latter part of his career he was often accompa-nied by younger and inexperienced councilmen whom we find at the Emperor’s Court in the sec-ond half of the fifteenth century.14 Jeronimus had trained and established his successors.

expertise and expert knowledge to my theoretic-al approach to diplomacy and develop it further within the context of my case study . There ap-pear to be three conditions for an expert culture within Nördlingen’s council and embassy:

(1) It is possible to counteract ignorance and incompetence by consulting some-one who knows better how to solve a specific problem; someone who carries a special knowledge or competence in this specific well-defined case (cf. ibid.; Berger and Luckmann 47) .(2) This special knowledge or competence has to have a relevance that goes beyond any particular or current matter . To expand on this: A person may maintain social, family or business networks in other cities and he may also carry special knowledge or know-how; however, this person would not be considered an expert in foreign af-fairs . In contrast an alderman with a guilds council or a merchant background who fostered these relationships as a coun-cilman, would be called an expert in this specific field (cf. Rexroth 23-24).(3) Experts depend on institutions . Know-ledge is transmitted in institutions where it is also stabilised and consolidated.

All three conditions can be illustrated by the situ-ation in Nördlingen: First, the Council of Nördlin-gen had already experienced first-hand that not all councilmen were equally qualified to be envoys . The result was that the pool of envoys was drastically reduced in number during the fif-teenth century . It also led to the emergence of specialists, for instance, envoys who were ex-clusively responsible for missions to the Imperial Court or missions to the Alliance .11 These spe-cialised envoys gradually learned how to han-dle different conventions and customs of their purview and were able to steer clear of potential embarrassing faux-pas . Second, a councilman’s and envoy’s repu-tation involved possessing the necessary skills and knowledge in the field of foreign affairs, and in the case of council members from the elite, this had been handed down in their families for generations (Kintzinger, Wissen 25-30; Borgolte 948). Therefore, at least at the beginning of the fifteenth century, this type of councilman had a noticeable advantage in terms of knowledge compared to the councilman from the guilds . Nevertheless, regarding the council’s ability to integrate inexperienced councilmen or men with different prior knowledge, it can be assumed that this specialist knowledge became independent of the individual; that is to say it became more generally accessible to the Old Council’s mem-bers. The specialist knowledge was not only influenced by the upper-class councilmen, but

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Works Cited

Bátori, Ingrid. “Ratsräson und Bürgersinn: Zur Führungs-schicht der Reichsstadt Nördlingen im 15. und 16. Jahrhun-dert .” Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Na-tions, and Empires: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Eds. Christopher Ocker et al. Leiden: Brill, 2007: 85-119.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. Die gesellschaft-liche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie der Wis-senssoziologie. Mit einer Einleitung zur deutschen Aus-gabe von Helmuth Plessner. Transl. by Monika Plessner. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, 222009 .

Borgolte, Michael. “Experten der Fremde. Gesandte in inter-kulturellen Beziehungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters.” Le relazioni internazionali nell’alto medioevo. Spoleto, 8–12 aprile 2010. Settimane di studio della Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 58. Spoleto: Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2011: 945-992.

Brenner, Bernhard. “Gab es Patrizier auch in Nördlingen und Donauwörth? Zur Ausprägung bürgerlicher Führungs-gruppen in Reichsstädten während des Spätmittelalters und der beginnenden Frühneuzeit.” Stadt und Land in der Geschichte Ostschwabens. Ed. Rolf Kießling. Augsburger Beiträge zur Landesgeschichte Bayerisch-Schwabens 10. Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, 2005: 29-70.

Bruchhäuser, Hanns-Peter. Kaufmannsbildung im Mittelalter: Determinanten des Curriculums deutscher Kaufleute im Spiegel der Formalisierung von Qualifizierungsprozessen . Cologne: Böhlau, 1989.

Denzel, Markus A. “Professionalisierung und sozialer Auf-stieg bei oberdeutschen Kaufleuten und Faktoren im 16. Jahrhundert .” Sozialer Aufstieg: Funktionseliten im Spät-mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Günther Schulz. Büdinger Forschungen zur Sozialgeschichte. Deutsche Führungsschichten in der Neuzeit 25. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2002: 413-442.

Frieß, Peer. “Reichsstädtische Diplomatie als Indikator für die politische Struktur einer Region.” Kommunikation und Region. Eds. Carl A. Hoffmann and Rolf Kießling. Forum Suevicum. Beiträge zur Geschichte Ostschwabens und der benachbarten Regionen 4. Constance: UVK Verlags-gesellschaft, 2001: 113-138.

Jörg, Christian. “Gesandte als Spezialisten: Zu den Hand-lungsspielräumen reichsstädtischer Gesandter während des späten Mittelalters .” Spezialisierung und Professiona-lisierung: Träger und Foren städtischer Außenpolitik während des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit . Eds. Christian Jörg and Michael Jucker. Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 1. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2010: 31-63.

Jörg, Christian, and Michael Jucker. “Städtische Gesandte – Städtische Außenpolitik: Zur Einführung.” Spezialisierung und Professionalisierung: Träger und Foren städtischer Außenpolitik während des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Eds. Christian Jörg and Michael Jucker. Trierer Beiträge zu den historischen Kulturwissenschaften 1. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2010: 11-30.

Kießling, Rolf . Die Stadt und ihr Land: Umlandpolitik, Bürger-besitz und Wirtschaftsgefüge in Ostschwaben vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert. Städteforschung. Reihe A: Darstellun-gen 29. Cologne: Böhlau, 1989.

Katharina Jeckel is the Academic Coordina-tor of the Graduate School Humanities and a member of the Department of History at the University of Freiburg. She is currentl y working on a thesis on fifteenth century diplo-macy in Nördlingen, supervised by Prof. Dr. Birgit Studt and Prof. Dr. Felix Heinzer.

1 StadtA Nördlingen. Missiven 1440 fol. 40.

2 Ibid.

3 Typical representatives of the older research tradition are Menzel and Mandel .

4 An extensive research survey of older and recent litera-ture is found in Liening 130-132, note 4-5, and Jörg and Jucker 22-30.

5 StadtA Nördlingen. Missive 1440 fol. 436-437.

6 Cf . “trew und fraintschaft […] ainigkait frids“, Müller 552 [Nördlinger Ordnungsbuch II, fol. 42a].

7 Cf . “was ain gemain nutz und notdurft antrift strenglich und vestiglich zuohandthaben”, ibid. 155 [Ratsordnung B 8, fol . 2a] .

8 Cf. “getrüwer ratgeb […] redlich urteil zuo geben […] nach ewrer besten verstentnus”, ibid. 165 [Ratsordnung B 44, fol . 8a] .

9 “Wann wir in der hailigen Schrift finden, das aller gewalt von Gott dem herren von oben herab ist, und das die ding, die von Gott sin, gar wol geordnet sind, us dem mügen wir verstan, wer zu gewalt erwelt wirt, das der den gewalt soll ordentlich gepruchen”, ibid. 154 [Ratsordnung B 1, fol. 1a].

10 This is a definition that is used in the context of the Re-search Training Group “Expert Cultures from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century” in which Prof. Dr. Frank Rexroth ex-plores the expert as an agent of knowledge. 19 November 2015 <http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/100303.html>.

11 Cf. Bátori 99-103. At the beginning of the fifteenth cen-tury, the widespread use of practically all councilmen as envo ys can be noted. During the second half of the century, however, only one-third of the councilmen served as envoys.

12 This derives from traditional school knowledge and a commercial education; cf. Denzel 425-426; Kintzinger, Scho-laster 360-62, and in great detail Bruchhäuser.

13 Examples for this development are the envoys Jeronimus von Bopfingen and Paul Strauß and in 1471 and 1485 Gabriel Eringer and Ott Vetter; cf. Bátori 101.

14 An early example is Jeronimus von Bopfingen, who ac-companied and trained the former guild master Paul Strauß during his first mission in 1449. Report from Ulm (1449 June 22), NöStA Missive 1449 fol. 38. Cf. Ibd. 101, 105.

Archives

Müller, Karl Otto, Ed . Nördlinger Stadtrechte des Mittelalters. 2. Munich: Verlag der Kommission für Bayerische Landes-geschichte, 1933 .

StadtA Nördlingen. Missive 1440 fol. 40, 1440 XI 17.

StadtA Nördlingen. Missive 1440 fol. 436f., 1440 VIII 20.

StadtA Nördlingen. Missive 1449 fol. 38, 1449 VI 22.

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The Envoy’s Honour and Reputation in Fifteenth-Century Urban Diplomacy

Kintzinger, Martin. “Scholaster und Schulmeister: Funktions-felder der Wissensvermittlung im späten Mittelalter .” Ge-lehrte im Reich: Zur Sozial- und Wirkungsgeschichte aka-demischer Eliten des 14. bis 16. Jahrhunderts . Eds . Rainer C. Schwinges and Markus Wriedt. Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beiheft 18. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996: 349-374.

---. Wissen wird Macht: Bildung im Mittelalter. Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 22007 .

Kudorfer, Dieter. Nördlingen. Historischer Atlas von Bay-ern. Schwaben. 1, 8. Munich: Kommission für Bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1974 .

Liening, Simon. “Überlegungen zum Gesandtschaftswesen der Stadt Straßburg zu Beginn des 15. Jahrhunderts.” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 162. NF 123 (2014): 129-148.

Mandel, Gudrun . Studien zur ‘Aussenpolitik’ der Reichs-städte im Spätmittelalter: Nach den deutschen Reichstag-akten von Wenzel bis Friedrich III. Masch. Universität Heidel berg, 1951.

Menzel, Viktor . Deutsches Gesandtschaftswesen im Mittel-alter. Hannover: Hahn, 1892 .

Rexroth, Frank. “Systemvertrauen und Expertenskepsis: Die Utopie vom maßgeschneiderten Wissen in den Kulturen des 12. bis 16. Jahrhunderts.” Wissen, maßgeschneidert: Experten und Expertenkulturen im Europa der Vormo-derne. Eds. Björn Reich et al. Historische Zeitschrift. Bei-hefte. NF 57. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012: 12-44.

Rogge, Jörg. Für den Gemeinen Nutzen: Politisches Han-deln und Politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter. Studia Augustana 6. Tübin-gen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996.

Rublack, Hans-Christoph. Eine bürgerliche Reformation: Nördlingen. Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformations-geschichte 51 . Gütersloh: Mohn, 1982 .

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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2016/QMR/06

On 5 November 1688 William of Orange, elected Stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Neth-erlands, landed at Torbay in Devon causing the Catholic king, James II, to leave his throne and escape to France . A few months later, the Con-vention Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered William and his wife Mary the crown as joint monarchs . This series of events is called ‘The Glorious Revolution’ .1 To many Protestants in England this meant the safety of their life, lib-erties and religion, which had been all seemingly invaded by James, who had tried to elevate the state of Catholics, who were excluded from civil and political participation . To achieve this aim, James used measures that contradicted what was by many seen as rightful: He ignored par-liamentary statutes, manipulated the choice of members of parliament and appointed Catholics to his Privy Council. His politics seemed to fulfil the fears of those who, in the late 1670s, had tried to exclude James from succession . This resulted in the turbulent events of the so-called Exclusion Crisis, which caused the division of the political landscape into Whigs and Tories . The twin threat of popery and arbitrary govern-ment, meaning the destruction of the Protestant religion, the invading of the laws of England as well as arbitrary rule without parliament were evoked by the Whigs to show the dangers of a Catholic king .2 What reinforced these fears was the miserable state of the French Huguenots who suffered under the religious policies of Louis XIV, who was seen as the personification of an absolute tyrant. To many Englishmen, European Protestantism was in a state of danger – a fear which structured the narrative of the Puritan min-ister Roger Morrice, who in his extensive Entring Book described political and religious events from 1678 to 1691 . Being part of a Presbyterian network of in-fluential Puritan politicians and nonconform-ist ministers in London, Morrice kept a kind of political diary or newsletter, the Entring Book, which brings to life the events between the Ex-clusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution .3 In almost a million words, Morrice recorded urban

and national politics . He was one of the most connected and informed Intelligencers who fre-quented Westminster and Whitehall and took part in representing the interests of London’s moderate nonconformists at court . However, he is strikingly hard to track down in historical records .4 In spite of this anonymity, his detailed and frequent records provide insight into the pol-itical culture of Restoration Britain. The Entring Book is also a valuable source for analysing the making of reputations . Given the abundance of names, events and topics of the Entring Book one can choose amongst many examples of how reputation, honour and celebrity were created at the courts of Charles II and James II . Morrice recorded the rise and fall of royal favourites and influential politicians as well as the decreasing reputation of King James himself, who challenged the loy-alty of his subjects at court, church and in parlia-ment . My paper is focused on Morrice’s percep-tion of William of Orange. It will be argued that to Morrice William became the symbol of an ideal ‘godly’ monarch who would safeguard the re-formed protestant religion, value the life and estates of British subjects and be the cham pion of morality and religious decency . Moreover, I will show how William himself worked to create the image of being an instrument of God, and to what extent this image is reflected in Morrice’s Entring Book . William’s reputation as mirrored in this book will be discussed as an example of how strongly religion and politics in early modern Britain were intertwined.5

Creating Reputation: William’s Self- Image as Safeguard of Protestantism

William had a distinctive reputation in Britain and continental Europe . An important element of his public image was his antagonism to the French king who, in 1672, had attacked the Unite d Provinces . William had resisted the French un-til the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678. Confronted

“The visible publick head of the Protestant interest in the World” The Reputation of William III as Mirrored in Roger Morrice’s The Entring Book

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between James and William. Morrice judged him an able “Statesman” who had made clear Wil-liam’s “resolution to stand in opposition to Popery and the designes of France […] and to promote and maintain the true reformed Protestant Reli-gion.” (EB Q134) William used agents at court like van Dijkvelt to foster his political programme. They met with important courtiers and distribut-ed information which shaped the image which men like Morrice had of William . In May 1687 van Dijkvelt turned to Morrice to gain information about the non-conformists’ position concerning a demise of James and the succession of William . Based on his trust on van Dijkvelt who informed him about William’s intentions, Morrice declared his support to the Dutch (cf. EB Q125). This shows how personal encounters and networks as well as access to information at court shaped William’s reputation in Morrice’s perception of political and religious events .8

Supporting Reputation: The Personnel of Propaganda

Moreover, William had established an Orange publicity office in The Hague. His propaganda was well-organised, benefitted from a network of political informants and the unrivalled power of the Dutch printing industry (cf. Claydon, William III 29). In his book on the Glorious Revolution and its European background, John Carswell identifies William’s well-concerted propaganda, rather than conspiracy or espionage, as his chief weapon in political conflict, both in domestic and international affairs: “He used propaganda like a stiletto, waiting for the opponent’s error, and then exploiting it by striking swiftly at a vulner able point.” (Carswell 27) William employed intel-ligence agents, English diplomatists and pas-sionate Huguenots such as Peter du Mouli n, or Scots with covenanting background like William Castares, who informed and influenced William’s interests in Britain. His propaganda was based on a sincere international Protest antism, the prot-est ant interest or simply the inter est which had to be secured from Catholic counter-reformation (cf. Carswell 25-29). A key person in Orangist propaganda in the 1680s was the Scottish-born Anglican cleric and future bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, who was outlawed by James in 1687 and became a close person of trust to Wil-liam and his wife Mary . Morrice frequently wrote about him. Burnet advised William not to cope with James’s efforts to repeal the Test Act which barred Catholics from civil and political offices. He furthermore published several pamph lets against James’ religious policies and advised

with French ambitions to expansion and Louis’ threats to attack Dutch land in 1682, William de-voted himself to opposing France. He described the French king as a threat to the continental balance of power and to the security of every independent state (cf . Claydon, William III 11) . As a Protestant, he was moreover concerned about the intolerance of Louis against reformed Christianity. News about the French king’s pro-ceedings against Huguenots swept the country and shocked British Protestants, who measured the conduct of their own Roman Catholic king by Louis’s persecution of his Protestant sub-jects .6 William envisaged himself as a safeguard of Protestantism against French – and thereby Catholic – cruelty and intolerance (cf. Claydon, William III 12) . These topics were highly relevant to Morrice . He regularly reported French cruelties against the Huguenots in his Entring Book and closely observed William’s negotiations with other states in Europe engaged in a war with France by the end of the 1680s . More than once Morrice iden-tified William as “the visible publick head of the Protestant Interest in the World” who would fight the Catholic threat in Europe (EB Q173). Yet Morrice was far from being naïve and did not fall uncritically for William’s propagandistic image as an unselfish protestant redeemer. When Morrice first heard of William’s plans to invade England he was quite aware of his national and Euro pean interests . He quoted William’s promise “that his predominant and prevalent ends was not carnall nor selfish”, but stated in October 1687: “The States and the Prince judge it their own true Pol-iticall interest for the support of themselves to keepe England out of the power of France and Popery for they would be left very weak if England should be overrun by either.” (EB Q173) Morrice was well aware of the specific national and Euro-pean interest William had in invading England .7

Gaining Information: The Mechanism s of News and Propaganda at Court

But how did Morrice gain information about William and his plans? How was the image of William as a champion of the Protestant religion transported to Britain? Since the early 1670s, William had consulted with leading Englishmen and cultivated a party of supporters within the English elite (cf . Claydon, William III 9) . Amongst these were influential Presbyterian members of Parliament with whom Morrice was closely con-nected . An important agent of William at James’s court was Everard van Weede van Dijkvelt, one of William’s principal favourites and a mediator

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The Reputation of William III as Mirrored in Roger Morrice’s The Entring Book

and in others cruelly tormented or Persecuted .” He further analyses that “besides the Encour-agement the […] Papists have from their Suc-cess, they are now more numerous, better united and are more entirely governed by the Jesuits.” (EB Q233) In Morrice’s eyes the reformation was in ever growing danger of being extirpated by the villainy of Rome and France. Instead, se-curing and further reforming Protestantism was especially important to him and his Presbyterian fellows . They devoted themselves to a decent and pious way of life, a devout daily religious practice and strove for godly rule in Britain (cf. Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs 148-151). This antagonism between reformed Protestant-ism and Popery derived from the distinct histo-riographical approach that characterizes John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) – a book which Morrice admired .14 It is a Protestant his-tory and martyrology recording the sufferings of Protestants under the Catholic Church with par-ticular emphasis on England and Scotland. The ideal of a godly prince was an integral element of this kind of early-protestant narrative: He would save the nation from the usurpation of Rome and work to complete the task of reformation .15 Gilbert Burnet, William’s chief propagandist in England, also used this mid-Tudor narrative for his History of the Reformation and created the vision of a prince who has been brought to power by God’s providence to serve as divine in-strument to promote the cause of true Christian-ity .16 Reformed princes would free themselves from papacy, assert their own sovereignty and set their people free from Rome’s obstructions to godliness and the gospel (cf . Goldie, Morrice and the Puritan Whigs 286-287).17 Following this interpretation, one can understand why Mor-rice and some leading Presbyterians were quite amenable to the reputation which William had created . They favoured William as an alternative monarch to James . Morrice was further convinced of William’s capacities on the basis of stories that were cir-culated at court. In December 1688 Morrice re-corded an anecdote which cited William saying that he aimed at “advancing the Glory of God, and the promoting of the Protestant Religion, to-gether with our Laws and Liberties, and therein he could appeal to the Great God, and desired he might prosper according to the Sincerity of his heart in that particular Case.” (EB Q367) He described William’s personal quali fication accordingly: “it is evident that he constantly discountenanceth Atheisme[,] Infidelity and the Ridiculing of Religion with that Sever ity that it never openly appeares before him.” In his re-tirements William “used to go to his closet and spend much time in Prayer[,] some times his

Williamite polemicists with his knowledge of English politics .9 He took a leading part in the production of William’s Declaration of Reasons, which stated the motives of William’s invasion in 1688 and which was a key piece of Or angist propaganda before and after his invasion.10

The Mechanisms of News and Information Beyond Court

However, it is important to take a short look at the broader context of communication and exchange of information in the Stuart era which was an im-portant factor for Morrice’s perception of William . Besides being at court, Morrice gained access to foreign information by letters and newsletters. For the period of the Entring Book there were practically no printed news papers, except the governmental London Gazette, which was pub-lished under royal scrutiny and censorship .11 Censors tried to ensure, for example, that noth-ing was printed about the French Huguenots. Yet Morrice relied on letters and newsletters: “Every post brings us an account of further unheard of cruelties in France” (EB P502), and “letters gen-erally report this” (EB P532). These letters were semi-public or written deliberately as letters of public news, often by merchants who brought news from abroad to London. They were read out loud at the Royal Exchange, at Westminster Hall or coffee houses, thereby informing a wide r public (cf. Goldie, Morrice and Puritan Whigs 110-112, 116-123).12 The Entring Book reveals such mechanisms of the acquirement and dis-semination of news and information .13 It displays the strong international communication system which enabled Morrice – and surely not just him – to mentally participate in events abroad. Closely observing William’s negotiations and ac-tions on the continent, Morrice therefore defined him as “the visible publick head of the Protestant Interest in the World” .

Religion and Reputation: William III as Godly Prince

To Morrice, Roman Catholicism was a tyranny and a usurpation . Furthermore, as Head of the Church of England, the Catholic King James would not be able to protect the true reformed Protestantism in Britain – a vision that was mir-rored in Morrice’s observations on Europe as well: “And as thus the Protestants are universal-ly weakened, so they are in most places utterly suppressed[,] in some others utterly destroyed,

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to uphold a specific image of William shaped the way William was perceived by Morrice. More-over, the talk of the streets and the information circulating at emerging public spaces were im-portant sources . Morrice integrated them into his vision of William . The Entring Book portrays a world in which a huge amount of news was available – news that shaped the way people perceived events and that could, as in Morrice’s case, shape the way reputations were created and received. This opportunity was seized by William, who managed a self-organised propa-ganda machine with which he transported his political and religious message into Europe . He employed able polemicists and benefited from supporters whose agendas coincided with Wil-liam’s political interests . Through the advice of well-informed propagandists such as Burnet he managed to use the current British fear of popery and arbitrary government and to insert it into his scheme of self-representation. Address-ing a specific interest group helped to strengthen his reputation and to turn it into action . He suc-cessfully presented himself as a redeemer from a Catholic threat and made use of the mid-Tudor ideal of the godly prince and moral reformer. Yet William could not have been so successful with-out an ideological platform on which his propa-ganda could flourish. Morrice’s own mind-set and hopes corresponded with William’s self-rep-resentation, and this is why Morrice accepted this image . It mirrored Morrice’s own political and religious aims . The Entring Book, Morrice’s perception of William as well as the latter’s self-representation were highly embedded in re-ligious structures and underscore the persistent importance of religion for the political culture of early modern Britain.

Nicole Packhaeuser was recently awarded her Master’s degree at the University of Freiburg. Her Master thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Ro-nald Asch and focused on the political-religious history of the Restoration in Early Modern Britain. This article at hand is part of her Master thesis .

1 For the Glorious Revolution, see for example Harris, Revo lution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 .

2 See for a contemporary account Marvell, The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, 1677 .

3 Cf. the edition by Goldie et al. Quotes from Morrice’s Entring Book (EB) are cited by manuscript volume and page, the three volumes being P, Q and R.

4 For biographical information on Morrice see Goldie, “Morrice, Roger (1628/9-1702)”, Oxford Dictionary of Nation-al Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., May 2011. 19 August 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/art-icle/37785>.

5 This approach is heavily stressed by Harris et al., The Politics of Religion in Restoration England .

Zeal was such that unobservedly he lifted up his Voice and was heard, and his Gentlemen have after he was come out of his closet found many tears dropped upon his table, as one told me as must know the truth thereof.” (EB Q367) These passages again reveal the mechanism of mak-ing reputation: the transaction of anecdotes, the sharing of estimations and the exchange of infor-mation through personal contact and ‘hear-say’ were important constituents of how the image of William as devout, godly prince was transported at court . Moreover, the personal piety which Wil-liam showed off satisfied Morrice’s ideal of de-voutness and strengthened his hope that William might morally reform the country . It was exactly this religious reform programme which was being promoted by William and Mary after the Revolution. Throughout his reign, Wil-liam’s propaganda rested on the narrative of having saved Britain from religious and moral decline. It was supported by the propaganda work of Gilbert Burnet, who emphatically tried to portray William’s invasion as a providential deliv-erance, brought to England by Protestant winds and the will of God .18 William promoted him clerk of the closet, thus making him the key figure of royal patronage . The propaganda strategy re-volved around fast-days, thanksgivings, royal proclamations and days of national humiliation (cf . Claydon, William III 100-110). These were means of presenting William as a serving father to the Church of England and a patron of the ref-ormation of manners and morals . To transport this message, Burnet advised William to recruit clerical helpers who William might consider for preferment. He understood the political import-ance and polemical abilities of preachers and sermons that would spread the ‘godly’ image of William to a broader public.19 The recommended ministers were leading clerics of the city of Lon-don and ministers with whom Morrice was well acquainted (cf . Claydon, William III 90-96).

Conclusions

Having and making reputation was an import-ant task to William of Orange, who through his doubtful position as a foreign ruler invading a for-eign country had to seek for a convincing narra-tive to justify his actions . The paper has concen-trated on the specific image transported through Morrice’s Entring Book and William’s self-rep-resentation . The means of personal contact and oral communication were striking features of making reputation at court .20 Morrice’s network of informants and his vivid exchange of informa-tion with courtiers who were themselves inclined

Nicole Packhaeuser

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The Reputation of William III as Mirrored in Roger Morrice’s The Entring Book

Dooley, Brendan, and Sabrina A. Baron, eds. The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe . London: Routledge, 2001 .

Firth, Katherine . The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformed Brit-ain, 1530-1645. Oxford: UP, 1979.

Fox, Adam . Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001 .

Foxe, John . Acts and Monuments . London, 1563 .

Goldie, Mark . Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The En-tring Book of Roger Morrice 1677-1691 . Volume 1 . Wood-bridge: The Boydell Press, 2007.

---. “Morrice, Roger (1628/9-1702).” Oxford Dictionary of Na-tional Biography. May 2011. 19 August 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37785>.

Goldie, Mark, et al ., eds . The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, 1677–1691. 6 Volumes. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007 .

Greig, Martin. “Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715).” Oxford Diction-ary of National Biography. September 2013. 26 July 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4061>.

Gwynn, Robin. “Roger Morrice and the Huguenot Refugees.” Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s . Ed . Jason McElligott . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 32-48.

Handover, P . M . A History of the London Gazette, 1665-1965 . London, 1965 .

Harris, Tim . Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Mon-archy, 1685-1720 . London: Allen Lane, 2006 .

Harris, Tim, et al ., eds . The Politics of Religion in Restoration England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Israel, Jonathan . The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact. Cambridge: UP, 1991 .

Jaod, Raymond, ed . News, Newspapers, and Society in Earl y Modern Britain . London: Frank Cass, 1999 .

Lamont, William . Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 . London: Macmillan, 1969 .

MacCubin, Robert F., and Martha Hamilton-Phillips, eds . The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics and Pa-tronage, 1688-1702. Williamsburg: College of William and Mary, 1989 .

Marvell, Andrew . The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Gov-ernment . 1677 .

Parker, Geoffrey. “Of Providence and Protestant Winds: the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch armada of 1688.” The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolu-tion and its World Impact. Ed. Jonathan Israel. Cambridge: UP, 1991. 335-364.

Pincus, Steven. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffee-houses and Restoration Political Culture .” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807-834.

6 See Gwynn, Roger Morrice and the Huguenot Refugees .

7 See for the international context of the Glorious Revolu-tion Israel, The Anglo-Dutch Moment .

8 For politics and patronage at court cf. MacCubin and Hamilton-Phillips, The Age of William III and Mary II .

9 See for example Burnet, Reasons against the Repealing the Acts and A Letter .

10 Cf . Greig in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .

11 See Handover, A History of the London Gazette .

12 For the coffee-houses see also Pincus, Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.

13 See furthermore Dooley and Baron, eds. The Politics of Information, as well as Joad, ed . News, Newspapers, and Society .

14 Cf . Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1563 .

15 See for example Lamont, Godly Prince: Politics and Re-ligion, 1603-1660 .

16 See Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England .

17 For the eschatological significance of the Reformation in protestant thought see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformed Britain, 1530-1645 .

18 See Burnet, A sermon preached in the chappel of St. James’s before his highness the prince of Orange, 23 De-cember 1688 in Claydon, William III 31. See furthermore: Parker, Geoffrey. “Of Providence and Protestant Winds: the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch armada of 1688.” The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolu-tion and its World Impact. Ed. Jonathan Israel. Cambridge: UP, 1991. 335-364.

19 See for the significance of the political sermon Claydon, The Sermon.

20 See further Fox, Oral and Literate Culture .

Works Cited

Burnet, Gilbert. Reasons against the Repealing the Acts of Parliament concerning the Test. Amsterdam, 1687 .

---. A Letter containing some Reflections on His Majesty’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience Dated the Fourth of April 1687 . 1687 .

---. The History of the Reformation of the Church of England . Ed. Nicholas Pocock. 7 Volumes. Oxford, 1865.

Carswell, John . The Descent on England: A Study of the English Revolution of 1688 and Its European Background . London: Barrie and Rockliff /The Cresset Press, 1969.

Claydon, Tony . William III and the Godly Revolution . Cam-bridge: UP, 1996.

---. “The Sermon, the ‘Public Sphere’ and the Political Cul-ture of Late Seventeenth-Century England.” The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750 . Eds . Anne Lori Ferrell, and Peter McCullough . Man-chester: UP, 2000: 208-234.

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Introduction

Honour and reputation are essential concepts for understanding early modern societies .1 In the seventeenth century, various notions of honour and reputation were co-existing: Each estate, gender and professional guild had their own, which resulted in them standing in competition and conflict with each other (cf. Asch, Honour 367) . Honour played an important role in forming the social structure of the estate-based society. By bestowing honour on or stripping somebody of their honour, a person or even a whole group could be either integrated or excluded from soci-ety or their estate . Furthermore, the social hier-archy as well as the order of rank between mem-bers of the same social group were determined by conflicts over claims of honour and reputation (cf. Backmann 16). Every person possessed an individual honour, which depended on their own deeds and behaviour, and the specific honour by which their estate distinguished itself from other groups of society (cf . Garnier 526) . Among these different concepts, the nobility’s perception of honour was one of the most prominent since it was determined by a wide repertoire of symbols, behavioural norms and forms of self-portrayal (cf. Schreiner 15), which played an essential role in noblemen’s competition over power and influence at court. As complex as the nobility’s concept of honour was, as easily could it be damaged: by military failure (in the case of men), a promiscuous lifestyle (in the case of women), insults and – as I will show – ridiculousness or, using the French source term, le ridicule . This essay is divided into two parts: First I will give a brief overview of the importance and function which honour and reputation had for noble men at the court of Louis XIV. They needed an honourable reputation if they wished to take part in political decisions concerning not only the reign of the country but also their own person-al status and privileges . In the second part I will examine the impact of ridiculousness on honour and reputation, the damage it could inflict, and

how it was purposefully used by noblemen to outmanoeuvre their opponents and rivals in the courtly struggle over power . The arguments will be illustrated by examples from the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755), the notorious and keen observer of the French court during the reign of Louis XIV .2

The Importance of Honour at the French Court under Louis XIV

When Louis XIV began his personal reign in 1661, the political centralisation process, which had been started under Richelieu, was coming to an end. Earlier historical research on absolutism assumed that the monarch’s absolute claim and monopoly on power, the French standing army and the process of bureaucratisation meant a decrease in nobility’s power and importance (cf . Asch, Europäischer Adel 255-256). Norbert Elias even stated that nobility transformed into a ‘domesticated’ estate, whose sole purpose was to serve the King at his court .3 These earlier assumptions are now viewed more critically; in particular Elias’s view on the ‘domesticated’ elite has been refuted in the light of newer research which shows that Louis XIV depended on the high-ranking noble families and respected their claims for prestige, honour and status to ensure a successful reign .4 It cannot be denied, how-ever, that in the course of cultural and political change, the function of the court became more important . It was the place where the King and the magnates (the high-ranking, most powerful aristocrats) were residing; the place where the major sources of power of the centralised state were held. To participate in the reign, noblemen had to be granted access to the King or the high nobility, so that they could influence them to a certain extent or at least get them to take their concerns into consideration . Since it was rather difficult for a low-ranking member of the nobility to get in direct contact with the people in powe r, even if Versailles was theoretically open to every

“Le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur” The Impact of Ridiculousness on Honour and Reputation at the French Court of Louis XIV

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capital. This severely limited his sphere of influ-ence within the noble society (cf. Backmann 15). Due to the fact that without ties to other noble-men and their families political influence was al-most impossible to gain, especially for members of the lower aristocratic ranks, losing one’s hon-our prevented a successful noble career.6 Hon-our could be damaged in many possible ways. One especially feared at court was le ridicule, ridiculousness, for it was an implicit, vague and subtle concept.7

The Impact of Ridiculousness and Laughter on Honour and Reputation

The concept of ridicule was of utter importance in seventeenth-century France. It indicated something which triggered laughter, and could refer to a person’s behaviour, clothing or speech pattern (cf. Bertrand 264-265). It provided a le-gitimate reason to laugh at someone . The term un ridicule named a man who deserved to be laughed at. The concept was well-established in the seventeenth century and did not need to be defined or theorised any more (cf. Bertrand 231). Conduct books, which steadily gained popularity at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, such as Morvan de Bellegarde’s bestseller Réflexions sur le ridicule et les moyens de l’éviter, did not provide a full explanation of the concept any more . Instead they only offered examples of incorrect behav-iour which could lead to ridiculousness . Most im-portantly, the books gave advice on how to pre-vent faux-pas (cf. Braungart 166). But why was being ridicule a problem, and why was it feared enough to cause a boom of conduct books and court manuals meant to prevent it? Ridiculous-ness was viewed as a threat to decorum: Be-coming ridiculous meant infringing on the norms of meetness, and as such the decency and taste which were regarded as qualities of the honnête homme – the new ideal of (noble) behaviour which played an important role in the representa-tion of noble identity (cf. Braungart 116; see also Höfer). Therefore ridicule was an offence against the aristocratic honour . The literary scholar Georg Braungart has argued that at the end of the seventeenth cen-tury the idea of ridicule became a norm, a valid truth and a recognised principle which did not need any proof, explanation or justification (cf. Braungart 231). As such it even grew into a sub-ject of moral discussion and was used as a stra-tegic argument in debates. Connected to wrong-ness, unreasonableness or even foolishness, it provided an easy way to invalidate arguments,

aristocrat, it was necessary for him to have ‘friends’ who could vouch for him and defend his interests . Taking part in power and the exercise of political influence were enabled by social net-works, patronage and clientelism .5 Moreover, within the royal patronage system one could receive tangible signs of favour such as posts, land, pensions and participation in tax farming (cf . Asch, Euopäischer Adel 219-220). Since the seventeenth century, therefore, in France, the King’s court was the place where a nobleman’s success and career were decided: the nobility competed for the monarch’s and the magnates’ favour and friendships, which did not only promise material and financial advantages, but were also the most efficient way to take part in political power. The same was true for noble-men’s claims of status, rank and honour . To en-force these claims, the King’s and the court’s approval was necessary. Thus a nobleman’s influence and social networks at court became increasingly important, while the support from his clients in the provinces steadily lost its rele-vance. Therefore, if noblemen wanted to protest against a decision, withdrawing to their country estate and staying away from court, as they had done in former centuries, was no longer an op-tion. If they wanted influence in any form, aristo-crats had to be present at court – by staying or at least travelling there from time to time. Absence from court meant risking a permanent loss of in-fluence and, in the worst case, a threat to the family’s rank in the hierarchy of nobility (cf. Asch, Europäischer Adel 219-220). But what enabled a member of the lower- ranking nobility or an insignificant nobleman from the provinces to gain the necessary sup-port and social networks at court? A nobleman’s keys to ‘friends’, patrons and social support were his honour and his reputation . Honour in seven-teenth-century France was part of what Bourdieu called “symbolic capital”, a ‘currency’ which could be accumulated, reduced and converted into economic or social capital (cf. Schreiner 11). Nobility’s demands concerning status and privil-eges were linked to individual and group-specif-ic honour, thus bringing a nobleman deference, respect and social recognition (cf. ibid. 5). The symbolic capital, becoming an important re-source in nobility’s competition over power and influence, provided commissions, pensions and also embed ment in social networks, which were essential for a nobleman’s career at the court and his family’s position in the hierarchy of no-bility (cf. ibid. 11). Dishonour resulted in just the opposite and isolated a nobleman. As a sanc-tion, it barred him from taking part in political de-cisions since it reduced his symbolic capital and therefore the ‘currency’ for economic and social

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The Impact of Ridiculousness on Honour and Reputation at the French Court of Louis XIV

ridiculous and honourless person oneself. Since a courtly career and political influence were im-possible without ‘friends’ and social networks, the young nobleman had no choice but to end his stay at the King’s court . Ridiculousness was perceived as a devi-ation of communicative rules and cultural norms which formed the aristocratic honour . A viola-tion of these norms was inevitably answered by peers with stigmatization and social exclusion (cf. Braungart 230). This was even worse when members of another estate were present at the time of the violation, because patterns of courtly behaviour had the function to make clear distinc-tions between the various social groups of the early modern estate-based society. Low-ranked aristocrats, nobles from the provinces, members of the noblesse de robe or even the bourgeoisie (the so-called parvenus), who tried to imitate the lifestyle and behaviour of higher nobility, were often viewed as ridiculous – not only in theatre (for example in the famous plays of Molière (see Jurt 57)), but also in conduct books, which rec-ommended that every person should act accord-ing to their social rank and position in society (cf . Bellegarde 218-219, 364, 367). The same was true for eccentric behaviour of higher-ranked nobles or ridiculous actions which went against the predominant ideals of noble behaviour (cf. Bertrand 276, 277, 279). ‘Social dissenters’ were not well received at court, because a ridiculous faux-pas embarrassed not only the perpetra-tor but also his whole estate. This forced the other members of the group to ostentatiously keep their distance from this unworthy noble-man. A nobleman who became ridiculous was socially dead (cf. Braungart 230). Ridicule did not only have considerable nega-tive consequences for the nobleman causing the faux-pas, but also for the representation of so-cial order . This risk of ridiculousness was espe-cially significant at large public ceremonies. The subversive character of laughter, which normally followed after a faux-pas, signified a threat for the representation and legitimation of the royal display and rightful claim of power, which were provided by the ceremonial. The ridiculousness of a blunder in the ritual (and the laughter it trig-gered) gave the impression of questioning the King’s self-portrayal and display of authority. The ridiculous person looked as if he did not take the ceremonial, and thus the King’s legitimation, ser-iously and the laughter contradicted the rever-ence which was owed to the King (cf. Schörle 148-150, 152).8

Saint-Simon experienced such an incident himself when he was sent as an ambassador to Spain in 1721/2. During his visit at the Spanish court, he had an audience with the Princess of

theses or the whole work of a person, and be-came a popular method to discredit an author (cf. Bertrand 269, 272-273). The possibilities of becoming ridiculous in seventeenth-century France were manifold: The complex conventions of the French court with its elaborate ceremonial, changing fashions and so-cial networks, shaped by intrigues and schemes, offered more than one opportunity for faux-pas and blunders. In principle, two ways of becoming ridicule can be differentiated: first, because of in-correct behaviour (the faux-pas), and second, by being embarrassed by a rival over power and influence. The court of the King formed one of the most important places where honour and repu-tation were built and received. It was import-ant for the nobility to know and follow courtly norms and behavioural codes since a faux-pas or a blunder could brand a person as ridicule. As La Roche foucauld would put it: “Le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur .” (La Roche-foucauld 65) Saint-Simon’s memoirs report the ex ample of a young nobleman, freshly intro-duced at court, who damaged his career by his own ridiculous behaviour. The author introduces the incident with the following words: “Je ne puis pas passer sous silence une aventure fort ridi-cule qui arriva au même homme à tous les deux [bals].” (Saint-Simon, Volume 1 97) At a ball at Marly a young nobleman was dancing so badly that the whole court started laughing . Even the King could barely restrain himself. The young nobleman excused himself, explaining his bad per form ance with the King’s presence and the fact that it made him nervous and he promised doing better next time. So at the next ball the court members were looking forward to his per-formance but it was even worse, which made the court burst into laughter and this time even the King joined in . After this incident the young nobleman left court immediately and did not re-turn for a long time: “Chacun, et le Roi même, rioit de tout son coeur, et la plupart en éclats, en telle sorte que je ne crois pas que personne ait jamais rien essuyé de semblable. Aussi dispa-rut-il incontinent après, et ne se remontra-t-il de longtemps.” (Saint-Simon, Volume 1 97) The ri-diculousness of his behaviour tainted the young nobleman’s reputation and honour too much for him to stay. His symbolic capital was reduced to nothing, thus leaving him without a resource he could exchange for economic capital or social support from other court members. His courtly career was finished before it even started. The episode evokes the impression that his ridicu-lousness was somehow contagious. Nobody wanted to deal with someone whose honour was tainted by ridiculousness, in fear of becoming a

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aristocratic ranking order . One development of the seventeenth century illustrates this problem: When competing elites started to imitate the ways of living of the venerable noblesse d’épée, certain ‘hybrid forms’ of noble lifestyle emerged, shaped by both aristocratic and bourgeois elem-ents, as can be observed for the noblesse de robe and other urban elites (cf. Asch, Europä-ischer Adel 157) .9 Even if attention was still paid to the separation of estates – at court as well as in the salons (cf. Lilti 148-158) – the amount of situations where different social estates and groups came in contact and sometimes even mixed increased, for example in marriages be-tween members of the noblesse d’épée and the nobles se de robe (cf . Asch, Staatsbildung 328; see also Asch, Europäischer Adel 43). Not only did the risks of misbehaviour and disrespectful conduct rise with the number of occasions, but the old elites also often had a critical (and per-haps slightly worried) view on these develop-ments. For this reason, courtly behaviour, fash-ion and speech patterns became a dominant metho d to distinguish oneself from the lower- ranking noble men, the nobility from the prov-inces and, of course, the noblesse de robe.10 In this context, le ridicule constituted a hidden mechanism of powe r, used by the higher nobility to consolidate their status and rank in the aris-tocratic hierarchy or at least to make it clearly visible. Since there were no written rules con-cerning the right conduct at court and the latest fashion trends concerning clothes, hairstyle and language, it was nearly impossible for outsiders to be ‘up to date’ – even with the help of con-duct books and court manuals. Since fashions were constantly changing, a nobleman had to be permanently present at court or – and this was continually stressed by the high nobility – had to be born into the right ‘circles’ to avoid ridiculous-ness through unfashionable appearance and blunders.11 The correct courtly behaviour, which was thought to show itself in a natural grâce, a certain ease, nonchalance and elegance, could only be obtained through birth and by being brought up within the specific ‘circles’ of higher nobility. The right behaviour patterns and con-duct codes were then adopted from childhood, and because of their experience, members of the court nobility could easily adapt to chang-ing fashions . Contemporaries assumed that the manners of lower nobility and the noblesse de robe, who had to learn the correct behaviour through conduct books, would always be recog-nisably marked by a certain stiffness of behav-iour that clearly distinguished them from the ‘nat-ural’ elegance of the court nobility (cf. Chartier 23; see also Asch, Europäischer Adel 157, 221) . This stiffness and ‘desperate’ attempts to copy the higher nobility’s grâce and sense of fashion

Asturias. Saint-Simon greeted the Princess with the deference required for such an occasion, but the Princess, instead of giving an appropriate answer, only let out a loud burp. Saint-Simon and the other court members present in the Princess’ chamber tried to hold their laughter. However, when the Princess burped for a sec-ond and, even louder, for a third time, they could not restrain themselves anymore. Everyone fled from the room as quickly as possible, trying not to laugh in front of the young Princess . Only when they had reached nearby rooms did they let their laughter out loud:

[…] moi en fuite avec tout ce qui m’ac-compagnoit, avec des éclats de rire d’autant plus grands qu’ils forcèrent les barrières que chacun avoit tâché d’y mettre . Toute la gravité espagnole fut déconcertée; tout fut dérangé; nulle ré-vérence; chacun pâmant de rire se sau-va comme il put, sans que la princesse en perdit son sérieux, […] On s’arrêta dans la pièce suivante pour rire tout à son aise, et s’étonner après plus libre-ment. (Saint-Simon, Volume 40 215-216)

The fact that the court members suppressed their laughter while still being in the Princess’s presence and that they fled to nearby rooms in-dicates how inappropriate a loud laughter would have been in this situation and context. They would have laughed at a noblewoman from the highest aristocratic rank, so that all due defer-ence would have been lost, and in the case of Saint-Simon, it also would had been a grave diplomatic mistake and an insult to the Spanish crown . The political tensions at audiences with foreign ambassadors were always high, and appropriate ceremonials and demonstrations of deference were extremely important for prevent-ing a political éclat – especially in the case of the strict Spanish court ceremonial, where showing emotions was deemed unworthy for the royal family because it opposed the royal dignity (cf. Schörle 150-151). Since their laughter would have destroyed the royal representation of the Princess and because they could not restrain themselves despite their effort, Saint-Simon and the other nobles had no choice but to turn away from the Princess . Leaving the ceremony was more easily excusable than displaying emotions and especially the unworthy laughter (cf. ibid.). The example from Saint-Simon’s memoirs describes a situation in a foreign country and between two parties from different nations. In such cases the representation of the nobility’s hierarchy was particularly crucial, and the sub-versive character of laughter and ridiculous faux-pas represented a precarious threat. But within French society, laughter and ridiculousness also constituted a threat to the social order and the

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efforts of social discipline and preservation of the inner peace and order. Moreover, it offered the nobility a sphere separate from the King’s au-thority to bargain their demands for honour and prestige, which went against the King’s image as an absolute monarch reigning over a well-order ed and ‘domesticated’ nobility. Therefore the duel was officially prohibited under Louis XIV (although it continued to exist ‘in secret’) .12 In-stead, the embarrassment of opponents through ridicule formed a perfect method to continue the struggle for honour and prestige without going against the state’s law and the King’s orders . It went along with the ideal of the honnête homme, who fought with words and not with weapons, thus following the rules of decency and respect-ing the given hierarchy . Nonetheless a nobleman had to be careful when ridiculing his opponent . Incorrect usage or an excess of mockery could easily go against the rules of decorum and disturb the courtly peace. To prevent such a disturbance one could use the method of the persiflage, which consist-ed in delivering an honorific speech but with an irony that was apparent to everyone in the audi-ence, except the person who was praised (cf . Lilti 280). An example is found in Saint-Simon’s memoirs, an incident which the author describes as “une satire continuelle de la vanité du prélat [Monsieur de Noyon], qui le tournoit pleinement en ridicule” (Saint-Simon, Volume 2 194) .The bishop of Noyon, François de Clermont-Tonnere (1629-1701), was known for his vanity.13 When a position at the Académie française became va-cant, the King decided to tease him and made him get elected into the academy without the bishop even being nominated or, according to Saint-Simon, possessing the necessary qualifi-cations . The King also declared that he would be very pleased if a lot of people were to come to the ceremony and festivities which were held for the bishop’s admission. Of course a large number of court members attended the cere-mony. An honorific speech was held by the Abbé Caumartin, the chairman of the Académie, who, in order to provide amusement for the crowd, and to win the King’s favour, prepared a high-ly ironic speech that imitated the bishop’s very own pompous style and language . Caumartin’s speech was a success: the audience was thrilled and the bishop did not realise the irony – on the contrary, at every given opportunity he continued to tell the story of the King’s favour and his glam-orous ceremony, until one of his opponents told him the truth. After that, he was so embarrassed that he left the court and Paris: “s’en alla passer sa honte dans son diocèse, où il demeura long-temps .” (Saint-Simon, Volume 2 201) He only forgave Abbé Caumartin on his deathbed.

could only result in ridiculousness, especially be-cause it was regarded as highly insolent to adopt a lifestyle clearly above one’s own position and rank in society. Therefore, not being familiar with the cultural norms, fashions and rules of the court and committing faux-pas, and ‘trying too hard’ to adapt were both deemed ridiculous. Of course the idea of nobility’s natural, con-genital elegance and taste did not necessarily correlate with reality . For members of nobility not constantly present at court it was hard to avoid ridiculousness, but even the court nobility was not free from the risk of ridicule . Considering the damage it could do to honour and reputation and the consequences for a nobleman’s courtly career, the fear of ridiculousness created high pressure on the noblemen staying at court, for-cing them to constantly watch not only their sur-roundings and the other court members but also their own behaviour and appearance (cf. Revel 197-198). This situation was intensified by the fact that ridicule was a popular method at court to harm one’s rivals . Le ridicule constituted a good instrument in nobility’s struggle for power and influence. It pro-vided a possibility to get rid of a rival by reducing his symbolic capital and thus isolating him from court society. It was an easy way of outman-oeuvr ing one’s opponents and reducing their in-fluence by separating them from their social net-works . Furthermore, mockery and jokes could help a nobleman’s career, since – as someone who provided occasion for laughter and amuse-ment – he became an interesting and entertain-ing person welcomed at court (cf. Bellegarde 375; see also Strosetzki 105). This could create the possibility of being invited by higher circles of court, and a good opportunity to establish con-tact with the social superiors . Embarrassing one’s opponent also went along with the ideal of the honnête homme . This behaviour pattern encouraged a peace-ful attitude that respected social harmony and was meant to please the other court members (cf. Strosetzki 104; see also Bertrand 280-281 and Asch, Honour 374) . The heroic ideal of the warrior, who gained his reputation by individual military victories and achievements, was slowly beginning to lose its predominate position under the reign of Louis XIV . The honnête homme sup-ported a more nonviolent form of representation and self-portrayal (cf. Bertrand 280-281; see also Asch, Honour 374) . This also had an impact on the way honour was claimed by nobility. Before the reign of Louis XIV, the duel was a common practice of negotiating and defending a noble-man’s honour. But the duel, which left at least one person dead and was of a revengeful na-ture, could not be brought in line with the state’s

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absolutely hated the colour grey and nobody had been wearing it for years. He ordered Tessé to immediately remove his hat and everyone, es-pecially Lauzan, laughed at their hearts’ content . Tessé, even if he was highly embarrassed and upset, could only stand there silently and endure his disgrace:

Et à l’instant, le bon duc [Lauzan] à pous-ser de rire et s’éclipser . “Lauzan s’est moqué de vous, répondit le Roi un peu vivement; croyez-moi, envoyez tout à l’heure ce chapeau-là au général des Prémontrés .” Jamais je ne vis homme plus confondu que Tessé: il demeura les yeux baissés et regardant ce chapeau avec une tristesse et une honte qui rendit la scène parfait. Aucun des spectateurs ne se contaignit le rire, ni des plus fami-liers avec le Roi d’en dire un mot. (Saint- Simon, Volume 5 363-364)

He could not even take revenge on Lauzan, who was well known at the court for playing mean pranks, and everyone told Tessé he had to blame himself for not knowing Lauzan’s character and for falling so easily for his trap:

Enfin Tessé reprit assez ses sens pour s’en aller; mais toute la cour lui en dit sa pensée, et lui demanda s’il ne connoissoit point encore M . de Lauzan, qui en rioit sous cape quand on lui en parloit . Avec tout cela, Tessé n’osa s’en fâcher, et la cose, quoique en peu forte, demeura en plaisanterie, dont Tessé fut longtemps tourmenté et bien honteux. (Saint-Simon, Volume 5 363-364)

Tessé’s powerlessness in regard of his embar-rassment and loss of honour shows the danger which lay within le ridicule: Becoming ridicule was especially harmful because one could not act against it. Unlike a direct offence, for which a nobleman might claim satisfaction from his rival to restore his honour, the loss of honour by ridiculousness could not be compensated – es-pecially if the embarrassment amused the crowd and the King. Even if a nobleman did go against the consensus, there was no satisfaction such as in duels, and therefore honour could not be restored. A mocked nobleman could only endure the ridiculousness and hope that the damage to his reputation and honour was not too great . The examples from the memoirs of Saint- Simon have shown that when using the method of ridiculing one’s rivals, noblemen were bound to certain rules that had to be followed. Most importantly, it was wise to only mock people of lower or more or less similar ranks . Conduct books did not recommend making fun of social superiors and even warned against doing so,

The persiflage was only one way of mockery. The use of obvious jokes and traps to embar-rass another court member was very common at court. The risk of being ridiculed by a rival was omnipresent, so that conduct books did not only recommend ways to prevent ridiculous behav-iour but also gave advice for the correct reaction when someone became the victim of mockery and laughter . This was necessary since a wrong reaction to an embarrassment could make the situation even worse. The problem lay in the near impossibility of a defence. Embarrassment by jokes and mockery, when well used, was in line with the ideal of the honnête homme and, contrary to direct insults, functioned within the cultural norms of the court. A nobleman could hardly defend himself against mockery espe-cially when the whole court started laughing . It became even worse when the King joined in. Going against the courtly consensus was impos-sible. The laughing court apparently approved of the jokes and embarrassment, which provided amusement and entertainment. The best way of countering such an embarrassment, or at least to reduce the damage done to one’s hon-our, was to join the laughter. Becoming angry or visibly upset just showed that the mockery was deserved and that the insulted did not share the King’s and the court’s opinion (cf. Bertrand 137-138; see also Schörle 81 and Bellegarde 206). Once more an example can be found in the mem-oirs of Saint-Simon: The King gave the order to make the military troops look splendorous, and so every officer tried his best to make his soldiers and himself look pompous in order to impress the King. In the military camp at Compiègne, 60,000 soldiers were garrisoned, and the Count of Tessé, René III de Froullay (1650-1725), who was in charge of the dragoons, was trying his best to gain the favour of the King and equip his troops well. When the King visited Campiègne, the Duke of Lauzan, Antonin Nompar de Cau-mont, Marquis de Puyguilhem (1632-1723), asked the Count of Tessé what hat he would be wearing when he would present himself and his soldiers to the King . Tessé replied that he in-tended to wear a simple bonnet, but Lauzan told him that it would be absolutely necessary for the Colonel General of the dragoons to wear a grey hat, since it was the privilege of the general to do so. Since the position of the Colonel General of the dragoons was originally created for Lau-zan, who had held this position for many years, Tessé trusted him on this matter and was very grateful for his advice . He immediately ordered a huge grey hat with a large feather from Paris . When the King arrived at Campiègne, the Count of Tessé was wearing his newly purchased gar-ment to impress him. Unfortunately the King

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the speech was undue. Even if the bishop’s hon-our was highly damaged and he left the court in shame, he still complained to the King about the incident . This led the King to take actions against Caumartin; since he had not respected the hier-archy of the nobility and even made it look as if the King was entirely responsible for the bishop’s loss of honour (the King wanted to tease the bishop, but not to this extent), Caumartin was banned from court and only the intervention of his brother prevented that he received a lettre de cachet. The method of bringing one’s oppon-ent into ridicule was a good means to destroy his symbolic capital and reducing his chances to build his career, but it was also quite danger-ous. Used in the wrong way, it could backfire and damage one’s own career .

Conclusion

At a court where political power and influence was exercised through social networks, ‘friends’, patronage and clientelism, the symbolic capital of a nobleman was decisive for his success. As an essential part of symbolic capital, honour and reputation constituted an important resource in the nobility’s competition and struggle for powe r and influence at court. But this honour and repu-tation could easily be stained by le ridicule. Since the concept of ridiculousness was relatively vague, not determined by strict rules and above all decided by constantly changing fashions, even a rising number of conduct books and court manuals at the end of the seventeenth century could not solve the problem. Members of the lower-ranking nobility, noblemen from the prov-inces, the noblesse de robe and other bourgeois elites had to rely on these books, since they were – contrary to the high court nobility which was born and raised in the courtly envir onment – not used to the courtly rules, norms and moral code . They often ran the risk of committing a faux-pas and becoming ridiculous due to their own in-appropriate behaviour. Once a person’s honour was tainted by ridiculousness, it was hard to stay at court, since nobody wanted to deal with some-one who was believed to be ridicu lous in fear of becoming ridiculous themselves. Without a so-cial network and support a successful career at court was not possible, so an honour damaged by ridiculousness could be fatal to a nobleman’s rank in the hierarchy of nobility. High-ranking aristocrats used the notion of ridiculousness to distinguish themselves from the lower nobility and especially from the bourgeois elites, reduc-ing their influence at court. Even if members of the lower aristocratic ranks and the bourgeois

since angering them could be dangerous. They normally possessed more economic and social capital and could easily take revenge and harm the mocker’s career and family (cf. Schörle 73-75). Additionally, the higher nobility held more than just symbolic capital. Of course their hon-our and reputation could also be damaged by ridiculousness and embarrassment, but they owned enough other resources to partly make up for the loss . The contrary was true for middle and especially lower-ranked noblemen: In their case, ridiculousness presented a great dan-ger because honour and reputation were often their most important and sometimes even their only resource in the competition for power and influence. It was therefore important for them not to make a fool of themselves by committing a faux-pas or by falling prey to higher-ranked noble men, who often made fun of lower ranked court members solely for their own amusement. These noblemen could also be made fun of by even higher-ranked individuals, for example by members of the King’s family (and we can find such instances in our source14), but the conse-quences were not as severe . Revenge was not the only reason to avoid the embarrassment of higher-ranked court members. Mockery had to adhere to the rules of hierarchy, because questioning the order of the court would cast the King in an unfavour-able light (cf. Bertrand 137). It was vital for the royal image and representation to reign over a well-ordered aristocracy which gained its honour and privileges only from him . The legitimation of the nobility’s position in society depended on the King; serving and obeying the King was its task. Although historical research does not longer val-idate the view of a completely submitted and ‘do-mesticated’ nobility under the reign of Loui s XIV, it still assumes that it was important for Loui s XIV’s reign to give the impression of an abso-lute ruler who was the sole holder of political power. Disturbing the hierarchy of the nobility by embarrassing a member who was clearly stand-ing above oneself meant destroying the image of the King’s absolute reign over a well-ordered, subordinated nobility. For this reason embar-rassments mostly took place in more private en-vironments – place s not accessible to everyone like the King’s tent at the camp of Campiègne or Marly, a smaller castle which the King used as a secluded retreat and where only the higher members of nobility where permitted. Therefore, the example of Caumartin and his ironic speech on the bishop of Noyon was highly problematic. As a matter of fact, it was well received by the audience, but the King was not amused. Cau-martin was ranked lower than the bishop, there was a huge crowd present at the ceremony and

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Therefore they constitute an important source for historical research concerning this period. Nonetheless they are not unproblematic. On the one hand Saint-Simon wanted to live up to a certain literary standard and wrote an entertaining oeuvre. His writing is clearly influenced by his temper and his emotions, which makes it quite subjective. On the other hand his report is strongly marked by his life experience and convictions: Saint-Simon was a duc et pair but nonetheless he did not possess any remarkable amount of power or in-fluence. He idealised the reign of Louis XIII, the time when his father had made his fortune, and he had a critical view on Louis XIV, whom he accused of depriving the nobility of its powe r and rightful position . His negative view on Louis XIV was strengthened by his hate for the King’s illegitimate chil-dren and his resentment for the noblesse de robe . He was trying hard to gain some influence at court, but neither he nor his son were able to make a successful career (cf. Dessert; see also Truc 264-266). Saint-Simon’s appraising and bitter view on the French court and Louis XIV had a notable influ-ence on earlier historical research, as for example the works of Norbert Elias (cf. Asch, Hof 119) .

3 On Elias’s theses see Elias, Höfische Gesellschaft and Elias, Prozess, and on the problematic aspects of his theses see Asch, Hof, and also the recent study by Horowski.

4 The term ‘absolutism’ is used with caution in recent his-torical research (especially in Germany), since it constitutes a theoretical construct which cannot be applied completely to the historical reality and which cannot describe the complex-ity of different historical developments with all their contradic-tions. The reign of Louis XIV is considered more ambivalent by newer historical research, since the King, when assigning important posts at his court, respected the claims and the position of the leading noble families. Moreover he hesitated to restrict the nobility’s fundamental privileges (such as tax exemption), since wealthy noblemen often lent money to the crown. Furthermore, the military offered the noblesse d’épée a promising career opportunity and approval of its rank and position (cf . Asch, Europäischer Adel 255-260). On the reign of Louis XIV see also Chaline and Collins .

5 The meaning and importance of friendship, patronage and clientelism was intensively researched within the Gradu-iertenkolleg 1288: “Freunde, Gönner, Getreue” at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg.

6 The amount of accumulated social and symbolic capital did not have an effect on the damage which could be done to a person’s honour . Even ‘wealthy’ people could lose all of their honour at once, if the attack on their honour was suc-cessful. The loss was therefore not a stealthy process but a sudden occurrence (cf. Schreiner 11).

7 The word ridicule is a very complex term which under-went significant change over the centuries and cannot be fully described in this brief essay. An overview of the se-mantic change is provided by Bertrand. On the meaning of ridiculousness in French literature see also the early work of Schalk. For better legibility I will also use the English transla-tion ‘ridiculousness’ .

8 On the meaning of rituals, ceremonies and symbolic communications see Stollberg-Rilinger.

9 During the early modern period until the late eighteenth century, social climbers imitated the lifestyle and self-fashion of nobility. An example of this process are the magnificent buildings which remind one of nobility’s castles and country estates. Such ‘processes of assimilation’ of the noble life-style helped nobility to preserve its cultural leadership (cf. Asch, Einführung 320-321).

10 The corporal habitus played an important role in this mat-ter . Contemporaries assumed that the social and cul tural su-periority of nobility manifested itself through a graceful pos-ture and elegant movements (cf . Asch, Europäischer Adel 143, 145-146).

elites tried to adapt to the courtly environment, their behaviour and appearance were regarded by high nobility as ‘stiff’, a futile attempt to imitate their own ‘congenital’ grâce and nonchalance – which was perceived as insolent and ridiculous . Since ridiculousness presented such a great danger to a nobleman’s honour and repu tation, it became a well-used weapon at court. Three as-pects made ridicule an effective method to harm one’s rivals and opponents: First, it went along with the courtly ideal of the honnête homme, which consisted in pleasing others by making them laugh and amusing them . Making jokes and mocking someone, if well used, could help a nobleman to fulfil this behavioural ideal and be well received at court. Second, since ridiculing someone was appropriate within the courtly be-havioural code, it could also be brought in line with the King’s orders . Part of Louis XIV’s image of the absolute monarch was the reign over a well-ordered and ‘domesticated’ nobility. Since duels – the traditional way by which aristocrats fought over honour and social prestige – were forbidden, because they not only presented a threat to the courtly peace but also gave the nobility a sphere to bargain their demands for honour and prestige outside of the monarch’s authority, ridiculing an opponent was a (new) method in the nobility’s competition for honour and prestige which respected the King’s orders and laws . Third, ridiculing a rival was a very ef-fective way to stain his honour, since there was hardly any possibility of defence or a chance to gain satisfaction to restore the damaged honour . As the examples from Saint-Simon’s memoirs have shown, ridiculousness presented a threat to honour and reputation, which noblemen at court tried to avoid at all cost . Kelly Minelli is a future PhD candidate at the Collaborative Research Center 948 (University of Freiburg). Her doctoral research will be super-vised by Prof. Dr. Ronald G. Asch and will focus on heroic models in German and French military ego-documents from 1756-1815.

1 Honour and reputation often have similar meanings . In this essay I understand reputation as a person’s ‘good repu-tation’, which consisted in being known for having some sort of remarkable or extraordinary skills, good character traits and qualities, or just being capable and trustworthy on the assigned task . Therefore it is close to the concept of ‘glory’ . A ‘bad reputation’ constituted in just the opposite. Honour will be understood – and I will explain it in detail in this essay – as part of a nobleman’s symbolic capital, a sort of reassurance and resource essential for the courtly competition for power and influence. On the notions of honour and reputation see also Ronald Asch’s and Christian Kühner’s essays in this issue .

2 Saint-Simon’s memoirs consist of forty-three volumes. They represent a very detailed report of the court life under Louis XIV and during the regency of the Duke of Orléans.

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Bertrand, Dominique. Dire le rire à l’âge classique: Représenter pour mieux contrôler. Aix-en-Provence: Publi-cations de l’Université de Provence, 1995.

Braungart, Georg. “Le ridicule: Sozialästhetische Normie-rung und moralische Sanktionierung zwischen höfischer und bürgerlicher Gesellschaft – Kontinuitäten und Umwer-tungen .” Semiotik, Rhetorik und Soziologie des Lachens: Vergleichende Studien zum Funktionswandel des Lachens vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart . Eds . Lothar Fietz et al . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996: 228-238.

Brioist, Pascal, et al. Croiser le fer: Violence et culture de l’épée dans la France moderne (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle) . Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2002.

Chaline, Olivier . Le règne de Louis XIV . Paris: Flammarion, 2005 .

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Collins, James . The State in Early Modern France . Cam-bridge: UP, 2009.

Dessert, Daniel. “Préface.” Saint-Simon: Louis XIV et sa cour. Bruxelles: Complexe, 1994. VII-XXI.

Elias, Norbert. Die Höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokra-tie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002.

---. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation 1: Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlan-des. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010.

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Fietz, Lothar. “Von der Sündhaftigkeit zur Lächerlichkeit der Vanitas.” Semiotik, Rhetorik und Soziologie des Lachens: Vergleichende Studien zum Funktionswandel des Lachens vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart . Eds . Lothar Fietz et al . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996: 189-202.

Garnier, Claudia. “Injurien und Satisfaktion: Zum Stellenwert rituellen Handelns in Ehrkonflikten des spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Adels .” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung: Vierteljahresschrift zur Erforschung des Spät-mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit 29.4 (2002): 525-561.

Höfer, Anette, and Rolf Reichardt. “Honnête homme, Honnê-teté, Honnêtes gens.” Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grund-begriffe in Frankreich 1680-1820. Eds . Roger Chartier and Thomas Schleich. Volume 7. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1986: 8-67.

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Revel, Jacques . “Les usages de la civilité .” Historie de la vie privée. Eds. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. Paris: Seuil, 1986: 169-209.

11 On the importance of fashion and clothes in French soci-ety see Roche .

12 On duels under the reign of Louis XIV see Asch, Hon-our 373, and Asch, Hof 129 . For a more general view on the development of duels in the early modern period see Brioist. The decrease of ‘public’ duels with several partici-pants was due to nobility’s changed ethos. The change of the ethos was partly due to the influence of the Catholic reform which propa gated a new, less violent and less heroic noble ideal (cf . Asch, Honour 373-374, see also Asch, Ständische Stellung 31) . Another factor also played an important part in these developments: Louis XIV’s politics stabilised the social order and respected the privileges of the noblesse d’épée. Even the claims of prestige of noble families which had fallen from political grace were preserved to a certain extent (cf . Asch, Honour 374) .

13 Vanity was generally seen as a trait which led to ridicu-lousness. Bellegarde even dedicates a whole chapter (“De la sotte vanité”) to it in his conduct book. A short overview of the significance of vanity and the development of the literary figure vanitas is given by Lothar Fietz.

14 See, for example, a joke played by the Prince of Condé to the Marshal of Luxembourg at a ball at Marly which ridiculed the Marshal in front of the whole court, or the example of the Princess of Harcourt, who was constantly mocked and ridi-culed by the Duke of Burgundy and his wife (cf. Saint-Simon, Volume 7 57-60; see also Saint-Simon, Volume 10 371-374).

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---. Europäischer Adel in der Frühen Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau, 2008.

---. “Hof, Adel und Monarchie: Norbert Eliasʼ Höfische Ge-sellschaft im Lichte der neueren Forschung .” Höfische Ge-sellschaft und Zivilisationsprozess: Norbert Eliasʼ Werk in kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive . Ed . Claudia Opitz . Cologne: Böhlau, 2005: 119-142.

---. “‘Honour in all parts of Europe will be ever like itself’: Ehre, adlige Standeskultur und Staatsbildung in Eng-land und Frankreich im späten 16 . und 17 . Jahrhundert: Disziplinierung oder Aushandeln von Statusansprüchen?” Staatsbildung als kultureller Prozess: Strukturwandel und Legitimation von Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit . Eds . Ronald G. Asch and Dagmar Freist. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005: 353-379.

---. “Staatsbildung und adlige Führungsschichten in der Frühen Neuzeit: Auf dem Weg zur Auflösung der ständi-schen Identität des Adels?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 33.3 (2007): 375-397.

---. “Ständische Stellung und Selbstverständnis des Adels im 17 . und 18 . Jahrhundert .” Der europäische Adel im Ancien Régime: Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600–1789) . Ed . Ronald G . Asch . Cologne: Böhlau, 2001. 3-45.

Backmann, Sibylle, and Hans-Jörg Künast. “Einführung.” Ehrkonzepte in der Frühen Neuzeit: Identitäten und Ab-grenzung. Eds. Sibylle Backmann et al. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998: 13-23.

Bellegarde, Morvan de. Réflexions sur le ridicule, et sur les moyens de l’éviter: Où sont représentez les differens carac-tères & les mœurs des personnes de ce siècle . La Haye: Guillaume de Voys, 1729 .

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Roche, Daniel. La culture des apparences: Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIᵉ-XVIIIᵉ siècle) . Paris: Fayard, 1991 .

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy de. Mémoires de Saint- Simon. Nouvelle édition collationnée sur le manuscrit auto-graphe, augmentée des additions de Saint-Simon au Jour-nal de Dangeau, Volume 1-43. Paris: Hachette, 1879-1928.

Schalk, Fritz. Das Lächerliche in der französischen Literatur des Ancien Régime . Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1954 .

Schörle, Eckart. Die Verhöflichung des Lachens: Lachge-schichte im 18. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007.

Schreiner, Klaus, and Gerd Schwerhoff. “Verletzte Ehre: Überlegungen zu einem Forschungskonzept”. Verletzte Ehre: Ehrkonflikte in Gesellschaften des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit. Eds. Klaus Schreiner and Gerd Scher-hoff. Cologne: Böhlau, 1995: 1-28.

Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, ed. Alles nur symbolisch? Bilanz und Perspektiven der Erforschung symbolischer Kommuni-kation. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005.

Strosetzki, Christoph. Konversation: Ein Kapitel gesellschaft-licher und literarischer Pragmatik in Frankreich des 17. Jahrhunderts . Frankfurt a . M .: Lang, 1978 .

Truc, Gonzague. “Saint-Simon im Spiegel der Kritik. (Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Memoiren von Saint-Simon)”. Die Memoiren des Herzogs von Saint-Simon. Vierter Band 1715-1723. Ed. Sigrid von Massenbach. Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein, 1977: 262-290.

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This paper presents a case study of the theatri-cal scene in eighteenth-century France to show how reputations can be actively employed in at-tempts to effect social change. The most famous Parisian theatres then (and in the whole history of France) were the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne. Their actors were ‘the king’s actors’ since Louis XIV had turned the two the-atres and the Opéra into royal companies . The Comédie-Française was created in 1680 by a royal ordinance of Louis XIV merging the only two Parisian troupes at the time, that of the Hôtel Guénégaud and that of the Hôtel de Bourgogne. All the performers were then under the supervi-sion of the First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, who was also the one responsible for the choice of the actors for the plays if the author was dead. The Comédie-Française was a symbol of good taste and had some help from the Crown and, most important, a monopoly on plays by French authors such as Molière and Racine. Being a member of the Comédie-Française was very prestigious and a way for actors to secure a salary and a pension when they had retired . Moreover, it was gender-neutral until the end of the eighteenth century . Women had an equal in volvement and the same executive power as men through the general assembly of the troupe. However, performers of the Comédie-Française, the Comédie-Italienne and provincial theatres did not enjoy civil and religious rights .2 Actors were automatically excommunicated from the French Catholic Church. Unless the performers retired from the stage and renounced their for-mer profession, the Church forbade its repre-sentatives from administering any of the Holy Sacraments to them. This paper will explore the civil and religious status of the performers under the Old Regime and the changes that occurred throughout the century, with a special focus on the actress Hyppolite Clairon of the Comédie-Française,3 who campaigned in the 1760s for performers to be granted civil rights. I will argue that the actress used her fame in an attempt to give her profession the respectability of citizenship at a time where being an actor was considered shameful .

Setting the Stage: The Context of the Eighteenth-Century Theatre

There is no doubt that actors in eighteenth-cen-tury France had a precarious reputation . Their behaviour (and especially that of female per-formers) was carefully scrutinised and aroused comment and criticism . Actresses were also often considered (with good reason or not) to be courtesans. Actors shocked people not only because of their profession (which was based on pretence, after all), but also because of inci-dents of actual misconduct . Indeed, actors were accused of being outspoken and having loose morals . It is just as undisputed that these actors were discriminated against. Not only could they not attend services, but their marriages were not validated and their children were officially illegit-imate . This was a unique situation in European history, and never before nor after have perform-ers been so badly treated by society. Indeed, there was no bull or official papal regulation con-demning theatre, nor any law that defined actors as infamous . In fact, the 1560s États Généraux affirmed quite the opposite (cf. Blanc 418). So, where did the discrimination of French actors come from? Even if theatre was getting more respectable and accepted by society,4 the reputation of per-formers remained a problem. Indeed, the norm of theatrical dialogue and performance was of ex-cessive prudery and forbade allusion to adultery and prostitution, or any kind of public endear-ment like kissing (cf . McManners 3) . Performers, and especially actresses, were scrutinized and criticised for their supposed loose morals . At the end of the seventeenth century, following the ex-treme piety of the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, bishops – among them Louis Antoine, cardinal de Noailles5 – succeeded in putting comedians on the list of public sinners. Thus the religious ostracism of performers became the norm. And although the intolerance towards actors was mainly ecclesiastical, they also were prejudiced civilly and socially . Actors did not have civil rights or even duties; they could not be witnesses in a

“Une contradiction trop absurde”

An Actress’s Fame and the Fight for Civil Rights in 1760s France 1

Anaïs Pedron

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& par conséquent, l’Infamie qu’on attache à mon état, me fait vous prier de jeter les yeux sur les Mémoires ci-joints.” (Clairon and Huerne de la Mothe xv) Clairon seems to be the supplicant, seeking the help of a lawyer to resolve her issue . At that time, however, Clairon was the greatest and the most celebrated actress of the French stage, while Huerne was an obscure lawyer in his fifties. Moreover, Clairon sent him a memo-randum that gave him information about the actors and what she was asking him to do . Her aim, with the help of the lawyer, was to prove to the au-thorities that not only was the systematic excom-munication of actors unfair but that it was illegal. Clairon started this memorandum by remind-ing Huerne that all actors came from Roman Catholic families, were baptised and that they believed in a religion that made them despicable to their own nation only because of their profes-sion. She then argued, disingenuously, that this excommunication was the reason for the mis-conduct of actors so that, if “la peine de l’Excom-munication cesse, l’infamie tombe sur le champ; & cette Société rétablie dans les Mystères de la Religion, fera fleurir le bon exemple & la bonne conduite.” (ibid. xix-xx) By linking the moral and societal issue of actors’ misconduct with excom-munication, Mademoiselle Clairon cleverly pre-sented a solid argument: that granting actors the same rights as all other French citizens would make them aware of their misbehaviour, would make them lead a more honest life and, conse-quently, would allow them to become virtuous role models for the nation, encouraging modesty and good behaviour among the French people.Huerne’s answer to the actress was reassuring:

Si jusqu’à présent vous avez parlé inutile-ment aux Ministres de l’Eglise, parlez à la Loi, parlez à ses Ministres, ils ne peuvent que vous répondre favorablement; parce que la Loi & ses Ministres sont garants des droits que vous reclamez. (ibid. xxxii)

The lawyer accepted the case and in 1761 pub-lished a pamphlet, preceded by Clairon’s memo-randum, which probably exceeded the actress’s expectations . Here he was very harsh on the Church and its ministers, condemning their arbi-trary reasons for excommunication . He asserted that the injustice of the actor’s excommunication was so important that people should choose be-tween following the Church or being a French citizen . Indeed, even if issues of citizenship and belief are traditionally not connected, Huerne believes that “dans notre France on a uni ces deux substances; de sorte que les Ministres de l’Eglise se sont imaginés avoir droit sur le Citoy-en, parce que l’Eglise a un pouvoir sur le Fidèle” (ibid. 13).

law court nor could they hold a municipal office (cf . McManners 9) . They could not inherit prop-erty, nor could they bequeath it. “Their lives were governed by the whims of four royal officers and noblemen, the Gentlemen of the King’s Cham-ber. These men, rather than the King’s judges and magistrates, were the only court of appeal for all personal and professional disputes affect-ing the troupe’s members.” (Ravel 75) However, the eighteenth century saw the rise of leading actresses, who were among the most celebrated women of their society. Claire-Josèphe Léris, known as Mademoiselle (Hip-polyte) Clairon, was the most talented, famous and admired actress of the second half of the eighteenth century (fig. 1) . In the 1760s, her presence in a play was enough to guarantee its success (cf. Lilti 43-44, note 10) . Clairon was aware of her talent and her fame, which gave her a stronger influence with the monarchy and its agents than her fellow actors. Her fame was the result of her talent, but it also made her (like all other actresses) an ob-ject of desire for the public, including high-ranked men . Clairon knew how to take advantage of her reputation and more than once declared herself the spokesperson of the actors . For instance, she headed a delegation of seven members of her troupe to the Contrôleur général to ask for the annual subsidy from the Crown which had fallen in arrears . Within minutes of explaining the troupe’s deplorable financial state, according to her memoirs, she received a note ordering im-mediate payment:

Le ministre m’aperçut, éloigna la foule qui l’entourait, et vint me demander ce qui m’amenait. Ma réponse fut: – Le dé-sespoir, monseigneur, où nous réduisent nos besoins et vos refus. – Je serais bien fâché, me dit-il, que vous eussiez à vous plaindre de moi: montez au bureau d’Amelin; dites-lui de tenir tout prêt pour me faire signer: vous serez payé demain . (Clairon 192-194)

Clairon and Huerne’s Pamphlet: A Clumsy Attempt to Give Actors Rights

In the first half of the 1760s, Clairon used her fame in a campaign against the ecclesiastical and civil restrictions imposed upon individuals in the acting profession . In 1761, she wrote a letter to the lawyer François-Charles Huerne de La Mothe, asking him to examine the laws about the excommunication of the actors: “La juste douleur que me cause l’Excommunication,

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from the order of the barristers. Instead of get-ting the actors the support of the literati and the French people, Huerne’s pamphlet had aroused violent criticism and opposition from the Church, the writers and the philosophers . At the same time, however, Huerne managed to catch the at-tention, and to some extent the support, of some influential ministers and thinkers of his time, not least through Clairon’s initiative . After he was sacked, Clairon used her high-ranking connec-tions to help Huerne: the Duc de Choiseul, Minis-ter of War and of Foreign Affairs and great admir-er of the actress, created a sinecure for Huerne in his ministry with an annual salary of three thousand eight hundred livres (cf . Ravel 79) .

Le Siège de Calais and the Actors’ Strike

Even if she lost a battle thanks to Huerne’s in-eptitude, Clairon was not defeated . In 1762, the curé of Saint-Gervais planned a funeral service for the playwright Crébillon at 6 pm. This meant that actors would not have been able to attend the service since theatre performances started at 5 or 5 .30 pm .

Mlle Clairon’s riposte was to sponsor a requiem, evading the archbishop’s juris-diction by holding it in the church of Saint-Jean-de-Latran in the precinct of the Tem-ple, under the patronage of the Order of Malta . The whole theatrical world turned up and the celebrant, disciplined by his ordinary, was consoled by a present of sil-ver . (McManners 5)

In April 1765, Clairon and the whole Comédie-Française were involved in an even more im-portant and dramatic quarrel. During the three weeks of the Easter break, the troupe decided to expel the veteran player Louis Blouin, known as Dubois (1706-1775), whose activities had sup-posedly disgraced the company .9 Mademoiselle Dubois, the actor’s daughter, used her person-al influence to convince the Gentlemen of the King’s Chamber to force the actors to reinstate her father in the troupe .10 The order arrived at the theatre on the day of the reopening of the theatre after the Easter break when the actors were expected to stage the highly anticipated play Le Siège de Calais .11 This play, first staged on 13 February 1765 at the Comédie-Française, had been a major success for the troupe. As Nick Roddick explains, “it is relevant to note that the actor’s performances were unanimously ap-plauded, with Mlle Clairon and Molé – two of the actors most involved in the subsequent dispute – receiving special public acclaim.” (Roddick 46) However, in order to express their dissatisfaction

According to Huerne, there was no religious law demanding the excommunication of actors .6 Even in Italy, the Church and its ministers neve r asked for the systematic excommunication of performers . The famous philosopher Voltaire,7 admirer and friend of Clairon was conscious of the cause: he wrote a memorandum asking for civil and religious rights for the actors; to prove his point, he collected proofs of the tolerance of the Church in Italy (cf . McManners 5) . Huerne further pointed out that the Comédie-Française was created following the wish of the king in 1680 and that its creation and the way it func-tioned were registered in Parliament, and that actors had the same rights and privileges as other citizens. In all the decrees made by the king for the Comédie-Française, Huerne noted, the actors were considered as citizens . Conse-quently, Huerne proposed a project of law that would limit the Church’s power over the citizens (cf. Clairon and Huerne de la Mothe 30-32). In-deed, excommunication could only be effective under the constraint of the civil law . Even more, this civil law would not only depend on the will of the king, but would be framed by and for the citi-zens’ rights . It is interesting to notice that Huerne does not mention actors in the law project; the terms he uses are generic . Thus every French person would be impacted by such a law: not only the Catholic French – who already enjoyed the status of citizens – but also actors, Protest-ants and Jews . However, Huerne’s pamphlet did not have any positive impact . Ecclesiastical authorities were offended by his assertions and disres-pectful tone . Indeed, Huerne had neglected an earlier Church legislation which clearly set a pre-ce dent for excommunication . The response from contemporaries was therefore bad: Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm wrote “le mémoire de Huerne est d’un imbécile, et si cruellement fait et si mal écrit, qu’il n’est pas possible d’en soutenir la lecture .” (Maugras 259) Even sup-porters of the actors’ cause were unconvinced and harshly criticised the text, like Voltaire, who wondered in a letter to d’Argental “comment lire sans se fâcher le detestable style du detestable avocet qui a fait un mémoire si illible?” (Voltaire 185) .8 Even Clairon did not hide her disappoint-ment . As she later wrote in in her memoirs:

il m’offrit ses services, je les acceptai; mais au lieu de s’instruire avec moi, de me consulter sur la forme, l’étendue et la te-neur de l’ouvrage que je désirais, pressé, je crois, par le besoin d’argent, il fit impri-mer son pauvre mémoire, et je le lus alors pour la première fois. (Clairon 194-195)

On 21 April 1761, Huerne’s pamphlet was con-demned to be lacerated and burned by a legal official. At the same time, Huerne was expelled

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people their entertainment. She was quickly forgotten and replaced on the stage and in the public’s minds. However, if French society and polit ical elites in the 1760s were not yet ready to grant actors civil rights, the French Revolu-tion made such change possible. On 21 Decem-ber 1789, Pierre Brunet de Latuque asked the National Assembly to give all non-Catholics civil rights. The Comte Stanislas de Clermont- Tonnerre forwarded the proposition and added all the professions previously excommunicated, including the formerly disreputable actors and executioners. On 24 December 1789, Protest-ants and all professions were finally awarded the same civil rights (cf. Hunt 146-147).

Anaïs Pedron is a second year part-time PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. Her thesis is titled Women of the Theatre and the Question of Rights in Paris, 1750-1800 and is supervised by Prof. Colin Jones.

1 In his letter of 1 May 1765, Voltaire wrote to Mademoi-selle Clairon: “c’est une contradiction trop absurde d’être au Fort-L’Evêque si on ne joue pas, et d’être excommunié par l’évêque si on joue.” (Voltaire, Volume XXIX 76)

2 The only exceptions were the dancers and singers of the Opera who were exempted because they were members of an Academy under Royal patronage (cf . McManners) .

3 Born in 1723, Clairon debuted in 1743 at the Comédie-Française and soon became one of the leading actresses of the French theatre .

4 There was a rise of private theatres at the court and in the city, the government encouraged the provinces to build the-atres (23 new ones from 1750 to 1773). See McManners 3.

5 Louis Antoine, Cardinal de Noailles (1651-1729), Arch-bishop of Paris from 1695 to 1729.

6 “Though they were sometimes loosely described as ex-communicate, strictly speaking this was incorrect, for no one could be put under such a sentence in France without the sanction of the secular law .” (McManners 1)

7 François Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694-1778) was a French writer and philosopher, famous for his fight against religious fanaticism .

8 Letter of 27 April 1761 (cf . Voltaire 185) .

9 Dubois had been treated for venereal diseases but ref-used to pay his surgeon . The actors did not sanction the dis-ease, nor the treatment, but the dishonesty of the actor and the lawsuit intended against him . They paid the surgeon and decided to expel him from the troupe .

10 As a pensionnaire of the Comédie (and not sociétaire) she had a personal relationship with the duc de Fronsac, one of the Gentilhommes de la Chambre.

11 Le Siège de Calais was a very popular patriotic play . The five-act tragedy is based on a historical event: the siege of Calais in 1347 by Edward III of England. It emphasises the heroism of the burghers of Calais and their mayor, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, who offered to be sacrificed to save the city and its citizens .

12 “a gesture whose sincerity should not be belittled, since it deprived him of the best source of income he would ever know” (Roddick 5) .

13 However, Clairon did play in some private theatres, for example at court in 1770, where she played in Hypermnestre by Lemierre.

and dissent, the actors gave excuses and did not show up on stage when the theatre re-opened after Easter. The public was so infuriated that they almost destroyed the theatre . The theatre remained closed the day after . As a reaction, the Gentlemen of the King’s Chamber and the Lieutenant of Police decided to send Clairon and four of the troupe’s leading men (Le Kain, Molé, Brizard and Dauberval) to prison, where they re-mained for almost four weeks. Clairon went back home sooner, due to her poor health, but she ref-used to perform and lobbied for the rights of the Comédie-Française. Moreover, it is interesting to notice that Belloy supported the actors’ fight and, thus, withdrew his play on 25 April .12

By mid-June, Clairon still refused to go back on the stage and was willing to retire with a pen-sion. Since she was the most talented and fam-ous member of the Comédie-Française at that time, “the Gentlemen offered her a number of incentives [ . . .]: direct payment from the Royal treasury, total control over the roles she played and the number of times she was required to per-form per year, and an end of her accountabil ity to her superiors” (Ravel 82). Clairon stubbornly refused these offers. Instead, confident of her fame, she staked her career and her future on the belief that the French monarchy would prefer to keep her on stage rather than maintain the excommunication on actors. She left the troupe with an open-ended leave, probably always in-tending to come back on stage, triumphant as an actress and as the saviour of the soul of the actors . However, after almost one year, Louis XV declared in February 1766 that “the decrees made during the time of Louis XIII sufficient-ly protected the troupe, and that he would not alter a situation which his ancestors had found ad equa te” (Ravel 83) . This decision ended Clairo n’s career for good. Offended and humili-ated, she asked for her unconditional retirement . The Gentlemen of the Chamber signed the order a few weeks later, on 23 April 1766, and Clairon never came back to a public stage.13

Despite her will and her strong leverage (her refusal to play and therefore to satisfy the public), Mademoiselle Clairon’s attempts to give actors full citizenship was a failure . Thanks to her repu-tation, she managed to get educated, influential and motivated men in her cause, but she failed to convince the only agent who could have turned into effect what she desired: the king. Clairon thus sacrificed her fame, her career and her live-lihood to the cause of liberating her profession from official persecution. Her trespassing of gen-der, social and religious boundaries ended her career and significantly altered her reputation. She was no longer considered a talented actress and an object of desire, but more as a trouble-maker challenging authorities and denying

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Maugras, Gaston . Les Comédiens Hors-La-Loi. Paris: C . Lévy, 1887 .

McManners, John . Abbés and Actresses: The Church and the Theatrical Profession in Eighteenth-Century France . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986 .

Ravel, Jeffrey S. “Actress to Activist: Mlle Clairon in the Public Sphere of the 1760s.” Theatre Survey 35.1 (1994): 73–86.

Roddick, Nick. “From Siege to Lock-out: An Actors’ Strike at the Comédie-Française in 1765.” Theatre Research Inter-national (New Series) 4.1 (1978): 45–58.

Voltaire . The Complete Works of Voltaire. Ed . Theodore Besterman. Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1972 .

Works Cited

Blanc, André. Histoire de la Comédie-Française: de Molière à Talma . Paris: Perrin, 2007 .

Clairon, Hyppolite . Mémoires d’Hyppolite Clairon, et ré-flexions sur l’art dramatique: publiés par elle-même . Paris: F. Buisson, 1798.

Clairon, Hyppolite, and François Charles Huerne de la Mothe . Libertes de la France, contre le pouvoir arbitraire de l’excommunication. Amsterdam: N.p., 1761.

Hunt, Lynn . Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Lilti, Antoine . Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité (1750-1850) . Paris: Fayard, 2014 .

fig. 1: Claire-Josèphe Léris, known as Mademoiselle (Hippolyte) Clairon (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica. 7 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84272667/f21.item.r=btv1b84272667>).

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“Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante”

On 21 September 1794, the remains of the as-sassinated journalist-politician Jean-Paul Marat were brought to the Pantheon in a 30-feet-high hearse followed by thousands of representatives from the nation’s armies, institutions and political bodies. To the soothing strains of an especial-ly composed hymn designed to evoke immor-tality, Marat’s decomposing body was solemnly escorted in beneath the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante”.2 His panthe-onisation marked the apex of a remarkable up-ward journey for Marat since his first arrest war-rant for “écrits incendiaires” in December 1789. It seemed like Marat’s quest for public recogni-tion had finally been realised.3

However, all was not as it seemed, for Marat’s reputation was already on the wane as part of a post-Thermidor backlash against the Jacobins following Robespierre’s execution in July 1794. A resurrected L’Ami du peuple (Marat’s former newspaper) speaking from beyond the grave noted the strange contradiction of awarding Marat “les honneurs de l’apothéose” at a time when “le maratisme est en exécration” .4 Just five months later, on 26 February 1795, against the backdrop of a sustained campaign against Marat’s posthumous cult, the Convention agreed to remove all traces of Marat from public space s, including the Pantheon .5 The effect was to trans-form Marat’s apotheosis into one of damnation and mark one of the most rapid reversals of his-torical reputation on record. As Mme de Staël ob-served in her posthumously published history of the Revolution: “Marat, dont la posterité se sou-viendra peut-être, afin de rattacher à un homme les crimes d’une époque” (Staël 49). Peut-être indeed! How prescient these words would turn out to be once Marat was made the main scape-goat for revolutionary excess .

This article is an exploration of how Marat’s “amour de la gloire” underpinned a lifelong drive for public recognition. First, it will contextualise the phrase within its wider eighteenth-century setting of the cult of grands hommes, tracing its evolution from martial ideal to civic aspiration . In particular, it will highlight the pervasive influence of classical ideals of heroic virtue and self-sacri-fice on the young Marat. Then, using examples drawn from Marat’s pre-revolutionary career and the Revolution’s early years, it will show how this idea underpinned Marat’s industry, worldview and publication strategies, often nourishing his intellectual life at the expense of his social re-lationships and livelihood. “[D]ès mon bas age”, he confessed to his readers, “j’ai été dévoré de l’amour de la gloire, passion qui changea sou-vent d’objet dans les diverses périodes de ma vie, mais qui ne m’a jamais quitté un instant .” (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques viii 5498)6

The Eighteenth-Century Context of “l’amour de la gloire”

So what was this extraordinary passion that consumed Marat so ardently? Literally translat-ed, “love of glory”, or fame, sounds rather nar-cissistic to modern ears, but I would suggest that its late eighteenth-century spirit is better rendered by a wish to serve “la chose publique” [public affairs] rather than to become an object of veneration. Using Google’s Ngram viewer to trace the phrase’s popularity over the long eight-eenth century, we can see that its usage takes off sharply after 1760 during the high Enlighten-ment, peaking around 1795 . Much of this derives from treatises on Christian virtue, eu logies to public figures, translations of classical authors, and revolutionary re-editions of major works by Montesquieu, Helvétius and Mably.

“I will leave a name and yours will perish”How Jean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire” Drove His Bid for Posterity1

Nigel Ritchie

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soldiers were still revered, their heroic examples became eclipsed by those of republican leaders and lawgivers, such as Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, who paid the ul-timate sacrifice twice, first with his sons and then with his life; or Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver; or Cincinnatus, the model of civic virtue, recalled from retirement to serve as temporary dictator and who immediately relinquished his post after defeating Rome’s rival tribes.10

It was not just classical heroes that Marat sought to emulate in his pursuit of ‘gloire’ . He also had more contemporary role models in mind – namely Montesquieu and the cen tury’s second greatest man, “mon maître, Rousseau” (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques 71 and 3369-3370).11 Evidence of Rousseau’s influence on Marat can be found dotted throughout his writing, in his frequent use of the confessional mode, and, particularly, in his debt to the moral message underpinning Rousseau’s First Dis-course on the Arts and Sciences (1750), and its critique of contemporary society. “One effect of luxury”, Marat wrote in his early political treatise, Chains of Slavery (1774), “is the extinguishing of heroic virtues”, including “amour de la gloire” (De Cock/Goëtz, Chains of Slavery 4266) . Rousseau labelled this drive towards seeking the esteem of others, “amour-propre”, in oppos-ition to its non-dependent version, “amour de soi”. Its corruption by self-interest, Rousseau argu ed, made it a source as much of vice as of virtue, and thus responsible for all the evils of the human condition .12 In his idealised political community, sketched out in Le Contrat Social, Rousseau suggested that citizens should be encouraged to sublimate these self-interests to-wards a greater whole, or la chose publique. By

According to historian David Bell, the long as-sociation of “gloire” with classical heroes and military virtue gradually evolved over the century to include great Frenchmen, promoted first by the popularity of collective biographies, such as Charles Perrault’s Les hommes illustres (1698), and then by the trend started by the Académie française in 1758, of eulogising the nation’s grands hommes. After the attribution was broad-ened to include civilians – first statesmen and then great writers, marking a change in em-phasis on society’s choice of grands hommes, a residual regard for martial qualities such as courage, duty and heroism remained . These eu-logies became such a part of the cultural fabric that philosophes and future revolutionaries all had a go. In his own eulogy to Montesquieu sub-mitted to Bordeaux’s Académie in 1785, Marat identified the great man’s “passion dominante [as] celle des belles âmes, l’amour de la gloire” (Marat 69, fig. 2) .7

A passion, moreover, which was actively nur-tured within the liberal humanist curriculum of all collège-educated pupils and encouraged by the eighteenth-century cult of grands hommes . Propagated within the pages of Plutarch’s best-selling Parallel Lives,8 the cult included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Marat’s future assassin, Charlotte Corday, amongst its devotees .9 Like his contemporaries, Marat grew up steeped in classical culture, despite leaving Neuchâtel’s Collège at the age of sixteen . All drew inspiration from the same narrow pool of classical source s . Besides Plutarch, Cicero, Livy and Tacitus all provided many of the role models from Ancient Rome and Sparta who embodied civic virtues, such as wisdom, austerity, courage, duty, and especially, sacrifice. While the exploits of great

fig 1: Google Ngram Viewer: Usage of “l’amour de la gloire” between 1700 and 1800.

Nigel Ritchie

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helden. heroes. héros.

Jean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire”

It was the love of glory, which produced those ancient heroes, whose achieve-ments so greatly astonish us, Alexander, Caesar, Gengiscan (sic) . It was the love of glory that made those yet more wonderful men, Thales, Zeno, Socrates, sacrifice all the pleasures of life and pass their days in the painful exercise of the most austere duties, continually exercising their souls by self-denial, thus keeping them always prepared for the strokes of adverse for-tune. (Marat i 250-251)14

Marat’s next public intervention, also published in England, The Chains of Slavery, was a work of political theory, which sought to reveal the hidden mechanisms of despotism . It set out to demonstrate how rulers covertly establish tyr-anny over a prolonged period of time . According to Marat’s diagnosis, one of the tyrant’s many ways of crushing public spirit was by “Rooting out the Love of Glory”, a chapter that came sand-wiched between ones on “Getting Creatures” [followers] and “Encouraging Servility”. Accord-ing to Marat’s analysis, rulers did everything in their power to change “the object of glory”, re-placing the “fame which the public dispenses [with] honours which they [the rulers] distribute” (De Cock/Goëtz, Chains of Slavery 4280) . Where a “love of gold” drove Man across stormy seas in its pursuit, a “love of glory” en-couraged “the philosopher and hero […] to con-sume life […] in the search of wisdom [and] the toilsome exercise of virtue” (Marat, A Philosoph-ical Essay on Man i 260). Virtue might be toil-some and time-consuming but the ultimate re-ward of public renown made it all worthwhile. It was also self-denying. In a letter Marat wrote to his friend Roume St-Laurent in September 1783, while pushing his candidacy for the presidency of Spain’s new Academy of Science, he de-clared: “Peut-être n’est il pas commun de trouver les auteurs prêts à sacrifier leur amour-propre à la gloire de leur Patrie: mais vous savez que mon âme ne connait pas les petites passions” (De Cock 347-348).15

It was only a short step from self-sacrifice to martyrdom and, as shown here, Marat was al-ready starting to see himself in these terms even before the Revolution, following his reinven-tion as an experimental physicist. Despite ini-tial endorsement of his experimental methodol-ogy, and the interest of Benjamin Franklin, the Académie des Sciences refused to endorse his published discoveries. There was nothing wrong with his carefully catalogued experiments, which he urged readers to reproduce; the problem came in his conclusions, which claimed to over-turn much accepted wisdom, including many of Newton’s key optical theories. His accusa-tions of conspiracy against the pro-Newtonian

way of illustration, he contrasted the strong, civic ethos of the Spartan republic consumed by “l’ar-dent amour de la gloire et de la patrie”, against the more servile tendencies of Christian nations (Rousseau, Religious Writings 210) .

“Le désir sincère d’être utile à l’humanité”

Prior to 1789, comments littered throughout Marat’s published writings and letters reveal a young man throwing himself fearlessly into a variety of contemporary debates on philosophy, physiology, politics, legal reform and the experi-mental sciences, and hoping to leave his mark in each one of them . As he told his readers:

J’ai porté dans mon cabinet le désir sin-cère d’être utile à l’humanité […] et ma passion dominante, de l’amour de la gloire; c’est elle seule qui a décidé du choix des matières que j’ai traitées, et qui m’a fait constamment rejeter tout sujet sur lequel je ne pouvais pas me promettre d’arriver au vrai, à de grands résultats, et d’être original. (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques viii 5499)13

In the opening pages of his first published work – A Philosophical Essay on Man – the 29-year-old Marat fired off a salvo of criticism at leading think-ers, including Galen, Hippocrates, Descartes, Helvétius, Haller and Lecat, for being “wholly ig-norant of its great and leading principles” (Marat, A Philosophical Essay on Man i xviii). The vol-ume’s provocative tone, which set a template for future writings, was born from a particular view of how progress was achieved . According to this worldview, strong passions propelled all human endeavours, and so could only be opposed by other strong passions . Only in this way could new ideas, and thus the world, move forward . In the refined intellectual world of gentlemen who shared a currency of tact and sociality, Marat’s “strong passion”, which might also be inter-preted as abrasive impatience, created many enemies. What others perceived to be his ex-cesses, were the logical consequence of stick-ing rigidly to these beliefs. In order to get his ideas noticed he thought he needed to give them a grand entrance with lots of noise. Years late r during the Revolution, this combative stance would serve him well as the backbone of his un-compromising ‘Ami du peuple’ persona . Marat’s Philosophical Essay, an investiga-tion into the mutual influence of the soul on the body, has many references to glory and sacrifice as the principal causes of human achievement . Plutarch has clearly left his mark:

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Marat ceaselessly reiterated this desire to sacri-fice himself to the patrie as proof of his devotion to the popular cause, until he reached a point where he could present his future death as just the last in a series of aspirational milestones: “A cinq ans, j’aurais voulu être maître d’école; à quinze ans, professeur; auteur, à dix-huit; génie créateur, à vingt comme j’ambitionne aujourd’hui la gloire de m’immoler pour la patrie” (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques viii 5498) .21 In the earl y years of the Revolution, this kind of talk was considered so outlandish that his contemporar-ies publicly questioned both his sincerity and his sanity, although it was by no means unique.22 However, by the establishment of the Republic in September 1792, against a continuing backdrop of war, this kind of patriotic, sacrificial lexicon was becoming a Jacobin commonplace, and just an-other way of proving one’s revolutionary virtue .23

“Faire le petit Marat”

Marat’s pessimistic belief in Man’s innate ten-dency toward corruption, which he shared with Rousseau, was a permanent theme in his writ-ing . This is why he told his readers that the only way the National Assembly could succeed was if their representatives closed their hearts to gold and opened them up to “gloire” instead .24 Any accusations of corruption against himself were vigorously defended . The quotation that heads this paper came from an explosive pamphlet that Marat self-published in January 1790, denouncing the popu lar finance minister Jacques Necker for bad faith and grain speculation .25 Defending himself against the accusations made by Necker’s propa gandists of being a hired pen, Marat sought to prove his probity by appealing first to Rousseau – “je suis peut-être le seul auteur depuis J.J qui dût être à l’abri du soupçon” – and then to the patrie (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques 616*). This way he could reframe his identity as a writer who was being persecuted for defending the right of the people. A writer, who setting out the gold/gloire equation once more, appealed only to posterity for his due reward:

Hé! Pour qui me suis-je fait ces nuées de mortels ennemis? Pour le peuple, ce pauvre peuple épuisé de misère, toujours vexé, toujours foulé, toujours opprimé … Hommes vils, qui ne connaissez d’autre passion dans la vie que l’or, ne me de-mandez pas quel intérêt me pressait. J’ai vengé l’humanité, je laisserai un nom, et le vôtre est fait pour périr. (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques 617*)26

“parti des philosophes” led his first serious Eng-lish biog rapher, Louis Gottschalk, to diagnose the beginnings of a “martyr complex” (Gottschalk 25-26).16 This became most evident in a strik-ing phrase that Marat coined in the preface to his last scientific treatise published in 1788. After explaining to his readers how his oppon-ents’ underhand tactics had prevented reviews of this work from appearing in the leading scien-tific journals, he added in a footnote: “On n’est pas fait pour être l’apôtre de la vérité quand on n’a pas le courage d’en être le martyr” (Marat, Mémoires académiques vi) . For Marat, this proud declamation of self-abnegation was fast becoming one of his hallmarks of authenticity.17

“Je me dévoue à la patrie et suis prêt à verser pour elle tout mon sang”

Following the king’s recall of the Estates-Gen eral in January 1789, Marat initially aimed to grab the attention of the political elite with lengthy pamphlets that gained little response, before refocus ing his attention on the wider public, with the founding of his Ami du peuple newspaper on 12 September. His philosophy of confrontation provided the key to his success . At a time when most other writers were praising revolution ary achievements, Marat was challenging the new political order . Freed from having to seek the recognition of socio-political elites as he had done in his earlier careers as an aspiring savant, Mara t sought his “gloire” directly from his service to the people, or patrie . For him, they were virtu-ally interchangeable. The clearest manifestation of Marat’s refocus-ed “gloire” was his integration of sacrificial lan-guage into journalistic discourse as a mark of his sincerity . A pact he sealed with his readers in the Latin slogan he ran across every issue: “Vitam impendere vero” (“To devote one’s life to the truth”), in a line that he borrowed from the Roman satirist Juvenal via Rousseau .18 It was a pact that he made clear to his readers right from the start . In an early “Profession de foi du rédac-teur” he addressed to his readers, he told them that, “la crainte ne peut rien sur mon âme. Je me dévoue à la patrie et suis prêt à verser pour elle tout mon sang.” (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques i 181)19 Eighteen months later, in Feb-ruary 1791, after nearly a year of being outlawed, he repledged his allegiance to the patrie in his “Serment civique”: “Je jure de toujours regarder la patrie comme ma mère, d’avoir pour elle toute la tendresse d’un fils […] de la défendre au péril de ma vie et, s’il faut, de m’immoler à son salut” (De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques iv 2293) .20

Nigel Ritchie

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Jean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire”

1 I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof . Colin Jones and Dr. Mark Curran, for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay.

2 “To great men, the grateful homeland” was carved upon the entrance of the newly deconsecrated L’Eglise Sainte-Geneviève.

3 This was despite his published wish to not be so ho-noured if it meant sharing such a space with “rascals” such as the Comte de Mirabeau. “Insigne pantalonnade des pères conscrits” in L’Ami du peuple #421, 6 April 1791, in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques v 2663 .

4 L’Ami du peuple #2, 20 September 1794, in Germani 191 . This version of Marat’s paper, which lasted for over a year, was written by Chasles and published by Réné-Fran-çois Lebois, a self-professed disciple of Marat.

5 For example, removing his bust from public spaces and his mausoleum from the Place du Carrousel .

6 Journal de la République française #98, 14 January 1793 .

7 Eloge de Montesquieu (1785). 7 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65075788>.

8 Published in the first century and translated into French in the seventeenth century. A work which drew inspiration it-self from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, with its promulga-tion of the civic notion of arete, or virtuous public duty.

9 See, for example, numerous references to Plutarch in Emile and Reveries du promeneur solitaire . Madame Roland wrote how she had “nourished” herself on Plutarch from the age of eight (Madame Roland 43 and 199) .

10 See, in particular, Parker, and also Higonnet 203. After Marat’s death, David compared Marat’s life to those of other great, classic heroes, such as Cato, Aristides, Socrates, Timoleon, Fabricius and Phocion. “Que sa vie nous serve d’exemple . Caton […] et Phocion, dont j’admire la respec-table vie, je n’ai pas vécu avec vous, mais j’ai connu Marat, je l’ai admiré comme vous; la posterité lui rendra justice”, in Rosenblum 83. Many prominent revolutionary figures, such as Mirabeau, Brissot and Corday either compared them-selves, or were compared, to ancient heroes, particularly Brutus.

11 La Constitution ou Projet de Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen suivi d’un plan de constitution juste, sage et libre (August 1789), in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques i 71 and 71*. See, for example, Marat’s eulogy to Rousseau at the end of De l’Homme (1775-1776), “Prête-moi ta plume pour célébrer toutes ces merveilles”, in De Cock 78; and his description of Rousseau as, “Mon maître, le plus grand homme qu’aurait produit le siècle, si Montesquieu n’eût pas existé”, in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques vi 3369-3370 (Les charlatans modernes, Lettre IX, September 1791).

12 The distinction between “amour-propre” as a socially de-pendent self-love, and “amour de soi-même” as a natural, non-dependent self-love, is first introduced in Rousseau’s second Discours sur l’inégalité [1754], in Gourevitch 218 . The distinction was not unique to him since it is also found in Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and others. See Neuhoser 13-14 for a useful commentary on this distinction .

13 Journal de la République française #98, 14 January 1793 .

14 Reference to “Amor Patriae” on the same page .

15 Letter from Jean-Paul Marat to Roume de Saint-Laurent, 20 September 1783.

16 See various letters from Marat to Roume sent between June and October 1783, in De Cock 328-374; and comments in Les Charlatans modernes, in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques vi 3348-3379.

17 For a good exploration of this idea, see Coleman 249-250.

18 From Juvenal (Satires IV) via Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first used it in his Lettre à d’Alembert [1758], in Rous-seau 132*.

On 22 January, four days after its publication, the municipal authorities issued an arrest war-rant, and the marquis de Lafayette, the leader of the National Guard, personally authorised an un-precedented 400-strong military invasion force to enter the Cordeliers district in order to execute it. Stalled by the legal sophistry of the Cordeliers’ leader, Georges Danton, a forewarned Marat was able to quietly slip away into the night and a three-month exile in London.27 As a result of this dramatic escape and the splash it made in the press, both men’s reputations were made as rising stars. In its report on these events, Louis- Marie Prudhomme’s Les Révolutions de Paris anticipated Marat’s growing status as a revolu-tionary scapegoat:

Souvenez-vous que parmi les écrivains patriotes, celui sur laquelle duquel il fal-lait frapper pour les effrayer tous était le sieur Marat, parce que son courage allait jusqu’à la rage, et que sa conviction se changeait quelquefois en délire . (Révolu-tions de Paris #29 3)28

As an illustration of how quickly Marat was be-coming the public face of insubordination, the next issue carried a letter from a member of the National Guard accusing the paper of wanting to “faire le petit Marat” by its criticism of Lafayette, and warning it to desist .29 Few revolutionary fig-ures earned their own eponym, even fewer so early on .30 When Marat returned to Paris in April there were several imitations of his newspaper on sale, and he had earned an entry in Antoine de Rivarol’s mocking Petit Dictionnaire des Grands Hommes de la Révolution (Riva rol 70) .31 There was no doubt that he was finally starting to make a name for himself . Industry, austerity, sacrifice – the key elem-ents were in place for Marat’s final bid for poster-ity once the Revolution began, but his martyrdom would make it conclusive. Neither Rivarol nor Marat could have imagined at the beginning of 1790 how his reputation would grow to the point where, following his death on 13 July 1793, his corpse would be accompanied by sixteen thou-sand mourners to a specially constructed tomb just outside the Cordeliers Club, his memory would be widely venerated in a personality cult, and his recognition as one of the Revolution’s grands hommes would be briefly immortalised within the hallowed precincts of the Pantheon . That this public recognition of his achievements was so short-lived, is, as they say, a whole other story (fig. 3) .

Nigel Ritchie is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. He also has an immi-nent article appearing in French History on, “An Anglo -French Revolutionary? Jean-Paul Maratchannels the spirits of Wilkes and Junius” .

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De Cock, Jacques, ed. Marat avant 1789. Brussels: fan-tasques éditions, 2003. 1 August 2015 <https://play.google. com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=read-er&id=qOu0Sb8XStcC&pg=GBS.PR1>.

Desmoulins, Camille. Œuvres de Camille Desmoulins avec une étude Biographique. 2 Volumes . Ed . Jules Claretie . Paris, 1874 .

France, Peter . Language and Rhetoric of the Revolution . Ed . John Renwick. Edinburgh: UP, 1990.

Gottschalk, Louis R . Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism . Chicago: UP, 1927.

Germani, Ian . Jean-Paul Marat, Hero and Anti-Hero of the French Revolution. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

Higonnet, Patrice . Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

Linton, Marisa . Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Au-thenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford: UP, 2013.

Marat, Jean-Paul. A Philosophical Essay on Man: Being an Attempt to Investigate the Principles and Laws of the Reciprocal Influence of the Soul on the Body. London: J. Ridley, 1773. 1 August 2015 <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004807815.0001.001>.

---. Eloge de Montesquieu. Paris: Libourne, 1883. 1 August 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65075788/f7.im-age>.

---. Mémoires académiques, ou Nouvelles découvertes sur la lumière, relatives aux points les plus importants de l’op-tique. Paris: N.-T. Méquignon, 1788. 1 August 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k824424>.

Neuhouser, Frederick. Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition. Oxford: UP, 2010 .

Parker, Harold Talbot. The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolu-tionary Spirit. Chicago: Octagon Books, 1937.

Révolutions de Paris. 1790. 1 August 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb328561374/date1790>.

Rivarol, Antoine de . Petit dictionnaire des grands hommes de la Révolution, par un citoyen actif, ci-devant ‘Rien’ . Ed. Louis Edmond Champcenetz. Paris: Impr. Nationale, 1790. 1 August 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k402726.r=Rivarol+Petit+dictionnaire.langEN>.

Roland, Marie-Jeanne. The Memoirs of Madame Roland: A Heroine of the French Revolution. Ed and Transl. by Evelyn Shuckburgh. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art. Princeton: UP, 1970.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. ‘The Discourses’ and Other Earl y Political Writings: Volume 1. Ed. Victor Gourevitch. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997.

---. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the The-atre. Transl. by Alan Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968.

---. Religious Writings . Ed . Ronald Grimsley . Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1970 .

Staël, Madame de. Considérations sur les principaux événe-ments de la Révolution française . Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2000 .

19 “Profession de foi du rédacteur .” L’Ami du peuple #13, 23 September 1789.

20 “Serment civique de l’Ami du people.” L’Ami du peuple #374, 17 February 1790.

21 Journal de la République française, #98, 14 January 1793 .

22 See, for example, Camille Desmoulins’ pamphlet, La France Libre (June 1789): “Je sens que je mourrais avec joie pour une si belle cause, et percé de coups, j’écrirai aussi de mon sang: La France est libre!”, in Desmoulins, i 132.

23 See, for example, Madame Roland: “whosoever counts their life as having a value in time of revolution will never value virtue, honour and patrie”, from Mme Roland’s Mémoire s (1793), in Linton 246. See also France 58.

24 See, for example, the extract from his Plan de Consti-tution pamphlet in Le Publiciste Parisien #5, 15 September 1789, in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques i 141 .

25 Marat had actually written his denunciation of Necker in October 1789 but struggled to find a printer because of its libellous nature and Necker’s powerful reputation. By spring 1790, despite the production of prints from his formidable propaganda machine, with titles such as “Necker, Malgré l’envie, au temple de mémoire, ton nom sera gravé par l’amour et la gloire”, declaring his public esteem as a fact, it was already starting to wane .

26 Dénonciation faite au tribunal de public par M. Marat l’ami du people contre M. Necker premier minister des finances, 18 January 1790, in De Cock/Goëtz, Œuvres politiques i 616* and 617* [fn. 67].

27 The Châtelet had already tried and failed to arrest him a fortnight earlier on 9 January 1790, provoking the Cordeliers district’s pledge to safeguard the freedom of the press within its territory .

28 Révolutions de Paris #29. 23-30 January 1790, 3. 7 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k105-1152x.image>.

29 Révolutions de Paris #30. 31 January - 6 February 1790, 32. 7 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt-6k1051154r.image>.

30 Only Robespierre, Brissot, Hébert and Babeuf spring to mind as examples of individual reputations becoming shorthand for a particular grouping or belief. Several of the more radical members of the Convention, such as David, Le-gendre, Bentabole, Tallien, Rovère, Delaunay-jeune, Chabot and Panis were described as “Maratistes” but Marat never actively organised a party around himself .

31 Rivarol described Marat as arousing the jealousy of the National Guard for being “l’ami intime du peuple”.

Works Cited

Bell, David A. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Na-tionalism, 1680-1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Coleman, Charly . The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individ-u alist History of the French Enlightenment. Stanford: UP, 2014 .

De Cock, Jacques, and Charlotte Goëtz, eds. Jean-Paul Marat: Œuvres politiques, 1789-1793. 10 Volumes. Brux-elles: Pole Nord, 1989-1995.

De Cock, Jacques, and Charlotte Goëtz, eds. Jean-Paul Marat: Les chaînes de l’esclavage (1793); The chains of slavery (1774). Bruxelles: Pole Nord, 1995.

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Jean-Paul Marat’s “amour de la gloire”

fig. 2: L’amour de la gloire / Le Prince (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica. 14 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8434532t.r=>).

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fig. 3: Le Triomphe de Marat l’ami du peuple. Placé au Panthéon français par la République 5.eme sansculotide l’an 2 de la République une et indivisible (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica. 14 December 2015 <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv-1b6949803r>).

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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2016/QMR/10

The Victorian era has long been recognised as a time of emerging middle-class values. Among these values, charity, altruism and modesty con-stituted a large part of the collective ideal of so-cial interaction . However, the same era is also commonly known as one of hypocrisy and want for social status. Victorian Britain was a world severely structured by classifications, and the effort to better oneself in order to become part of a higher class was characteristic of its society . There was thus considerable tension between the proclaimed value of modesty and the effort to put one’s actions on public display to rise into the higher ranks of society . This tension was also palpable in the representation of honour and heroism in the popular media of the day . In the following I will argue that during the sec-ond half of the nineteenth century the concept of honour was located within the contested area between public and private life, between intern al values and external validation . Taking ex amples from two popular periodicals, Chambers’s Journ al and The Leisure Hour, I will illustrate how the term – which before had been closely connected to public reputation1 – was appropri-ated for the lower middle and working classes and used as a didactic tool to encourage behav-iour conforming to dominant middle-class ideals of the day . When examining print products like Chambers’s Journal or The Leisure Hour, which were created by the upper-middle classes for the lower-middle and working classes, a tendency to denounce the seeking of public recognition in fa-vour of modest honour emerges very clearly . My analysis will focus on representations of the heroic, since a hero (male or female), ac-cording to the predominant usage of the term at the time, was the embodiment of ideal social norms and thus operated on the border terri tory between private honour – as the heroic figure presented inert values worthy of imitation – and public honours – since the deeds deemed hon-ourable often resulted in public recognition and the bestowing of honours. This led to the cre ation of the ideal modest middle-class hero, a hero whose acts were motivated by idealistic values, not by the desire for glory or fame. However, this

notion was complicated by the fact that this form of undemanding heroism was represented – and thereby in a way already honoured – in a public medium and within an industry which makes and breaks reputations itself. As a mass medium, print publications have to be considered both an indi-cator of social values as well as their producer .

Locating Honour Between Individual and Society

The basic definitions of honour in the Oxford English Dictionary confirm the tension between public and private honour and indicate that there are different functions of honour for individuals and collectives. Identifying two basic meanings of “honour” (both of which are proven to be in use in the nineteenth century), the dictionary cites the first definition as “Great respect, este em, or reverence received, gained or enjoyed by a person or thing; glory, renown, fame; repu tation, good name” (“Honour” n .p ., emphases mine) . According to this meaning, honour is bestowed upon a person, i.e. ascribed to someone from the outside .2 In contrast, the second definition reads: “Quality of character entitling a person to great respect; nobility of mind or spiri t; honour-ableness, uprightness; a fine sense of, and strict adherence to, what is considered to be morally right or just” (ibid., emphases mine). This def-inition constructs honour in a fundamentally dif-ferent way . It does not only add a moral claim . Whereas the first definition presents honour as something ascribed by one person (or group, or institution) to another person in an act of honour-ing, the second definition roots honour ‘within’ an individual. Honour, in this case, refers back to a set of moral norms and conventions and in this sense serves as a guiding principle for a person . Naturally, “what is considered to be morally right and just” is not an independent individual judge-ment but relates to group attitudes as well. Inter-estingly, however, while honour in the second definition might be inspired by and oriented at a group or public, its recognition can be private.

Public vs. Private Honour The Precarious Case of Victorian Modest Heroism in Chambers’s Journal and The Leisure Hour

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The article “What is Heroism?” (CJ 9 May 1857, 297-298) articulates this contrast between pri-vate and public honour very prominently: As the title suggests, the text aims at a definition of hero ism. In its first part, it illustrates a kind of be-haviour which is considered as an inferior form of heroism – one which is on public display. This form of heroism is recorded in biographies by historians or “ballad-singers” (297) who ascribe an honourable hero-status to the subjects of their writings. Thereby, the text argues, the ‘fame’ of heroism – the fact that the act of heroism is pub-licly talked about – also attracts characters who merely seek fame and public recognition and act without a moral agenda: “Every action, however praiseworthy and virtuous in outward seeming, may be accounted for, if we so incline, by con-summate hypocrisy, far-sighted selfishness, or immoderate pride.” (ibid.) To contrast this public form of honour, which Chamber’s Journal often described with the word “honours”, the article in its second half constructs a concept of heroism of “a higher kind, which is often not patent to the world, which requires no grand stage and no dramatic incidents to give its lustre.” (ibid.) This form of praiseworthy conduct is described as less situational, less dependent on specific cir-cumstances (such as a war which is necessary for soldierly heroism), but rather determined by an honourable heroic character, a moral dispos-ition which allows for heroic actions in a less pub-lic forum: “the higher kind of heroism of which I speak, avoids rather than seeks the pomp and circumstance of war and the glare of publicity.” (ibid.) ‘True’ heroism, as described by the text, seems to exist without a medium and an audi-ence and is situated in the “private life” (ibid.). It is the private, sometimes even domestic sphere which is identified as the sphere of true heroes, in contrast to the public, attention-seeking nature or the more superficial heroism.4

Acts of heroism which are ‘not’ communicat-ed to others are thus regarded as the highest heroic deeds . The didactic message of the text is obvious: behind closed doors, everybody can feel like a hero, and heroism becomes attainable for all, even those who are not publicly praised: “Such heroism [...] lies as much within the reach of the man of peace as of the warrior, of the pri-vate citizen as of the statesman or sage” (ibid.). In the emphasising of this form of heroism, the text gives readers from different parts of soci-ety the opportunity to feel included in the rank of heroes if they act according to a set of internal-ised morals – according to their personal hon-our. Thereby, the concept of honour, which in the first half of the article refers to a more traditional heroism, as a way of recognising and reward-ing heroic acts, is re-appropriated for the target

Though honour in both cases seems to be a means to validate an individual’s group-conform behaviour, the sphere and the audience in which this is recognised are fundamentally different in each case: on the one hand, honour is awarded in a public act which involves the active consen-sus of a group; on the other hand it is an act of private internal recognition of an individual which is ‘guided’ by the rules of a specific group. Julian Pitt-Rivers in his considerations on “Honour and Shame” also refers to both the col-lective and the individual form of honour:

Honour is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society . It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknow-ledgment of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride. […] Honour, therefore, provides a nexus between the ideals of a society and their reproduction in the individual through his aspiration to personify them . As such, it implies not merely a habitual preference for a given mode of conduct, but the en-titlement to a certain treatment in return . (Pitt-Rivers 21-22, emphasis mine)

Internalised Honour as a Didactic Tool

Honour as an individual, even private practice features frequently on the pages of Chambers’s Journal . The popular periodical, which ap-peared from 1832 until 1956, was directed at the lowe r-middle and working classes and had a strongly didactic claim . It aimed to provide infor-mation and education in an entertaining format to the whole of the family, to parents and children alike, and contained articles in a large variety of genres (cf . “The Editor’s Address to His Read-ers” CJ 4 February 1832, 1-2). As part of this didactic approach, many articles within the pub-lication discussed, overtly in essays or more cov-ertly in narratives, societally acceptable norms of behaviour and conduct and employed a concept of private, internal honour – as a state of mind to aspire to . In this context, honour, rather than an externally ascribed virtue to be fought for as it was commonly understood until the end of the early modern period,3 was considered an intrin-sic moral compass to live by. Accordingly, it was often contrasted with concepts that referred to more public attention such as glory, fame and honours . Especially during the 1850s, 60s and 70s, Chambers’s Journal often used the idea of internal honour in combination with heroism as a motivational, didactic concept for the readers to emulate .

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Victorian Modest Heroism in Chambers’s Journal and The Leisure Hour

So long as the world and the heart are young, Shall deeds of daring and valour be sung; And the hand of the poet shall throw the rhyme At the feet of the hero of battle-time.But nobler deeds are done every day In the world close by, than in fight or fray.There are heroes whose prowess never sees light, Far greater than ever was ancient knight .In many a heart lies a secret tale That would make the Homeric legends pale:And oft is a deed of valour untold Which is meet to be written in letters of gold!

Many contributors, as exemplified in this poem, aimed at telling stories of “unsung heroes”, most of whom were fictitious characters, who had the advantage that they could not contribute to the fame or celebrity of any actual person but would arouse the audience’s “sympathy” (“A Few Words About Heroes” 223). Through this feeling of sympathy, the social function of the heroic was stressed, and the identificatory potential of the heroic for the intended readership was activated . As could be seen in the examples above, Chambers’s Journal strongly proclaimed the message that humble, silent heroism – motiv-ate d by a sense of internal honour, a guiding set of values – should replace both more tradition-al forms of public hero-worship as well as the newl y developing celebrity-cult of the day. The latter was considered to be too superficial, self-ish and attention-seeking, whereas the ‘humble’ form of heroism could be more easily integrated into the readers’ lives and produced role models considered worthy of emulation by the producers of the periodical . Thus, the previous examples can be seen as showing what James Bowman calls ‘cultural honour’, a form of honour “which gives us a set of stories and a vocabulary with which to teach young people what a society-wide honor group expects of them as men, or women” (“Honor: An Interview with Jamie Glazov” n .p .) . Cultural honour8 with its focus on didactic medi-ation can be utilised to create a set of norms and values and to stabilise communities. Not surprisingly, contrasting depictions of internal heroic honour and external acts of ap-preciation and honours are found frequently, especially during the 1850s, 60s and 70s, a time when the middle classes rose in societal, but also political importance in Britain and an insecurity among the elites as how to deal with this development was palpable. In this context, Chambers’s Journal’s effort to establish a form of private heroism, an honourable moral mind-set, can also be interpreted as an attempt to validate

audience of the periodical, the lower-middle and working classes, as ‘motivation’ for acceptable norm-conforming behaviour. It turns the unattain-able, out-of-reach, and publicly honoured hero into an attainable role model that can be emu-lated because internalised ‘honour’ is favoured over public ‘honours’.

“Craving for ‘honours’”: A Problematic Call for Un-Communicated Heroism

Chambers’s Journal made the distinction be-tween public and private honour in many art-icles relating to heroism. “A Few Words About Heroes” complains: “See how the craving for ‘honours’ as they are called betrays a man into faulty logic and false morality.” (4 October 1856, 222) Another article marks the growing celeb-rity5 of heroes as “the worst of vulgar hero-wor-ship” (“Popular Heroes” 24 October 1863, 264) because it does not necessarily refer to actual achievements or social values, but is mostly due to a large dissemination of stories with popular appeal and sensational potential . In this context, criticising the ‘mass production’ of heroes is at the same time a criticism of the contemporary media which produce them:

But is this not the manufacturing age, and is there not a manufacture of heroes as well as of calico and railway bars? I for one am a hero-worshipper, and don’t mind avowing the fact; but I have not yet been able to worship manufactured heroes, or to feel any sympathy with those who are always ready to come forward with their testimonial. (“A Few Words About Heroes” 222-223)

With this interpretation of popular heroes as products of mass production, the function of the heroic changes: while individual (as opposed to mass produced) heroes evoke a sympathy in their admirers because they stand on common moral ground, manufactured heroes rather seem to aim for sensation and entertainment and to seek fame and honours . Again the media are implicitly criticised . The most popular heroes, who find “their way so often into print” (“Popular Heroes” 264), are those that many editors and contributors of the periodical press calculated to sell best,6 not those whom they might consider worth emulating . As a possible exit from this dilemma of hero worship, Chambers’s Journal suggested a turn towards the private, away from celebrated heroes of history writing, song and literature to “unsung heroes” (“Unsung Heroes” 27 July 1888, 464)7:

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codex which guides them in their endeavours abroad. It is their expertise in “questions [of] hon-our and duty” (“Italian Explorers in Africa” March 1890, 228) which distinguishes the missionaries in their work with African natives . And although many texts stress that the missionaries who do not care about “titles of honour” and are “quiet, unassuming, straight-forward hero[es] (“Rec-ollections of African Explorers” February 1890, 259), the men are considered worthy of group honour, a form of honour which, in comparison to the notion propagated in Chambers’s Journal, does already involve a degree of external recog-nition . One text, for example, praises a mission-ary for his untiring work and expresses the hope that he “may long enjoy the honours he has won, and that he will use his influence in advancing the best interests of the race under the Portu-guese crown, in such ways as David Livingstone and François Coillard would approve” (“Recent African Exploration” July 1881, 418) . Phrases such as this, and especially the comparison of the men to famous missionaries such as Living-stone, clearly place them in a distinct group of people with distinct values .11 The fact that they are literally ‘on a mission’ whose execution and outcome can be judged within the group turns their actions into group-relevant and thus more public events than the examples given from Chambers’s Journal .12

Returning to the initial definitions of honour, it is obvious that The Leisure Hour constructs a sense of honour which puts a stronger emphasis on the collective . The social function of honour as a group’s common set of values stands at the centre of the usage of honour in the periodical . This can be related to the religious orientation of the periodical and the resulting heightened im-portance of the (religious) group in relation to the individual . In contrast, Chambers’s Journal, with its secular claim, was more closely connected to the idea of growing importance of the individual within society .13 On the whole, the representation of modest heroism and its relation to honour in the two peri-odicals can be seen as a reaction to several de-velopments in the second half of the nineteenth century: the didactic papers’ intention not to con-tribute to a growing glorification of heroes shows how closely the phenomenon of celebrity is linked to mass media and its market place . Fur-thermore, both periodicals’ focus on ‘common’ moral heroes, be they fictitious ‘unsung’ ones or missionaries unknown to the public, mirrors tendencies of growing democratisation and the increasing importance of the middle class and its values. By presenting examples of modest pri-vate honour and heroism, the publications want-ed to provide examples for the lower classes to

the lives of the middle and working classes in an effort to calm any tendencies towards social up-heaval which might endanger the existing order . In its internalised form, honour could function as an inclusive concept of validation that – if prac-tised by an individual in private – concerned each and every person irrespective of their class, age or gender .9 Interestingly, coming back to Pitt- Rivers’s definition, honour as represented through the humble hero in Chambers’s Journal does ‘not’ entitle them “to a certain treatment in return” (22): the validation is merely private and does not include validating interaction . This is where a fundamental tension lies in all the texts which propagate this form of hon-our-motivated heroism: by propagating a private heroism, the texts turn this idea into their very own form of public honour. They praise some-thing which had the core characteristic that it should ‘not’ want to be praised and publicly awarded, something which was defined as seek-ing no public recognition. On the other hand, the attractiveness of the vocabulary of heroism lay in the very fact that is was connected to public forms of attention .10 This contradiction is appar-ent in many texts regarding the heroic and the above-illustrated form of internal honour and it is, interestingly, never reflected upon in the page s of the periodical .

Appreciation Between Public Recognition and Private Ideals

The Leisure Hour, which I want to shortly discuss in comparison to the examples above, presents its readers with a slightly different interpretation of honour. Unlike the independently published Chambers’s Journal, The Leisure Hour was published by an association, the Religious Tract Society. Like Chambers’s, it was aimed at the lower-middle and working classes and was prod-uced with a didactic purpose which, given the in-stitutional background, was also a religious one. In regards to honour and heroism, The Leis ure Hour also shows attempts to validate the every-day life of ordinary people in its hardships and often does so in the vocabulary of the heroic. However, honour is less frequently discussed as an internal guiding quality of an individual, but rather as a codex which binds a group of people together . Given the religious orientation of this publication, it is not surprising that stories about missionaries – and their honourable actions – are featured repeatedly. These men – for it is almost exclusively men that are discussed in this con-text – are described as selfless, heroic and as acting according to a common moral, religious

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11 Stewart defines an “honor group“ as a group of “people who follow the same code of honor and recognize each other as doing so” (146) . Consequently, the adherence to a spe-cific group honour necessarily involves communication and recognition, which was not overtly present in the private form of honour as described in Chambers’s Journal .

12 Furthermore, the individual missionary’s actions through their group membership benefited from the high public visibil-ity and respectability of missionary work and values in general.

13 Interestingly, when looking at the frequency of the usage of the vocabulary of honour and heroism (in combination) in the two periodicals, one can see a decrease in usage in the last decades of the century in Chambers’s Journal, as democratisation became a fact rather than a development and an increase in The Leisure Hour as religious stability and the relevance of missionary work became more contested as the empire began to crumble.

Works Cited

“A Few Words About Heroes.” Chambers’s Journal 4 Octo-ber 1856: 222-223.

Bowman, James. Honor: A History. New York: Encounter Books, 2007.

---. “Honor: An Interview with Jamie Glazov”. 29 July 2015 <http://www.jamesbowman.net/articleDetail.asp?pub-ID=1726>.

“Celebrity”. Oxford English Dictionary. 12 August 2015 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/29424? redirectedFrom=celebri-ty#eid>.

“Honour” . Oxford English Dictionary. 25 July 2015 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/88227?rskey=T77ZZD&result =-1&isAdvanced=false#eid>.

“Italian Explorers in Africa .” The Leisure Hour March 1890: 226-231.

Pitt-Rivers, Julian. “Honour and Social Status.” Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. Ed . Jean G . Peristiany. Chicago: UP, 1966. 19-77.

“Popular Heroes .” Chambers’s Journal 24 October 1863: 264-266.

Price, John . Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

“Recent African Exploration.” The Leisure Hour July 1881: 412-418.

“Recollections of African Explorers .” The Leisure Hour Feb-ruary 1890: 259-262.

Stewart, Frank Henderson. Honor. Chicago: UP, 1994.

“Stray Thoughts in a Library.” Chambers’s Journal 5 June 1880: 365-366.

“The Editor’s Address to His Readers .” Chambers’s Journal 4 February 1932: 1-2.

“Unsung Heroes.” Chambers’s Journal 27 July 1888: 464 .

von den Hoff, Ralf et al. “Helden – Heroisierungen – Hero-ismen: Transformationen und Konjunkturen von der Anti-ke bis zur Moderne: Konzeptionelle Ausgangspunkte des Sonderforschungsbereichs 948”. helden. heroes. héros. E-Journal zu Kulturen des Heroischen 1.1 (2013): 7-14. DOI 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2013/01/03.

“What is Heroism .” Chambers’s Journal 9 May 1857: 297-298 .

emulate and aspire to while at the same time maintaining existing societal norms . One major paradox remains though: as producers within the marketplace and public organs themselves, both periodicals not only created a sense of hon-our for a very specific group, but addressed a more general public – and thus were part of the very machinery that made reputations .

Christiane Hadamitzky is a research associatein project C4 of the Collaborative Research Center 948 at the University of Freiburg. She has recently completed her disser tation on ne-gotiations of the heroic in Victorian magazines between 1850 and 1890.

1 Cf. Stewart 1994, Pitt-Rivers 1966, or Bowman 2007. Though differing in their conclusions, all three authors agree that up until the end of the early modern period, honour was primarily used to describe the public reputation and recogni-tion of an individual in the framework of a social hierarchy .

2 The mentioning of glory, fame and reputation in this def-in ition is significant, since all of them imply a public opinion.

3 Frank Henderson Stewart describes honour in this sense as a “reflexive system”: “there is an honor code that demands that the man whose honor is impugned mount a counterattack .” (147)

4 This idea of a heroic figure which exists without commu-nication or medium is highly problematic. As von den Hoff et al . argue, the heroic only comes into existence through mediation (11) . Thus, the idea of an unmediated heroism within a public medium constitutes a conceptual clash which cannot be resolved. The article discussed tries to negotiate this tension by not giving any example for the ‘true’ form of heroism, but rather refers to the underlying values identified for humble heroics, such as perseverance and selflessness. However, on the whole, the call for an un-mediated heroism within the periodical remains an inconsistency .

5 The OED lists as definitions of “celebrity” that were in use in the nineteenth century: “The condition of being much extolled or talked about; famousness, notoriety” and “a per-son of celebrity; a celebrated person: a public character.” (“Celebrity”, n.p.)

6 As one article states: “How much closer are we drawn to our favourite heroes in biography, when we know how they were loved and reverenced by their nearest relatives.” (“Stray Thoughts in a Library” CJ 5 June 1880, 365-366) Ac-cordingly, the media coverage of historical heroes undergoes a change as well and it is remarked that the private life of historical personalities increasingly becomes the focus of public attention, drawing those ‘heroes’ closer to the status of celebrities.

7 See also the call for a form of heroism “which requires no grand stage” in “What is Heroism” (9 May 1857, 297) .

8 Cultural honour in Bowman’s sense has to be seen in differentiation from the previously referred to reflexive hon-our which calls for active (and often violent) defence when threatened .

9 Thereby, the private form of honour is not as closely linked to manliness as more public forms, which are almost exclu-sively linked to male agency (cf., for example, Stewart 148).

10 These public forms of attention were becoming more and more attractive for civilians of the lower and middle classes in the second half of the century, with the Royal Humane Society (founded 1874) or the Albert Medal (instituted 1864) rewarding the selfless conduct of civilians (see, for example, Price 2014) .

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Reputation as a Construct of Value

Humanitarian aid is regularly associated with im-partiality and the idea that true humanitarian en-deavours treat all people equally .1 If aid organ isa-tions do not have sufficient supplies for all who are suffering, impartiality dictates that supplies are distributed evenly and without regard to a person’s name, race, gender or ability. However, often the reputation of a person or group of per-sons involved in a conflict supersede these hu-manitarian aims, and they receive treatment that is better, or perceived to be better, than the rest of the population .2 Furthermore, humanitarian crises with a disproportionate level of resources compared to need often lead to reputation play-ing a key role as decisions on who will receive aid become integral to the distribution process. This article examines one case in which very scarce resources led a humanitarian organisa-tion to make significant life-or-death decisions on which recipients would be valued above the others – decisions that were based on a reputa-tion of the intellectual . Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss claim that non-political aid agencies “are interested in saving lives and not saving societies” (Barnett and Weiss 38) . Political aid agencies, then, are interested in saving societies rather than solely saving individuals, and the emigration efforts of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief at the end of the Spanish Civil War epitomised this theory. In May 1939, the National Joint Com-mittee chartered the first mass emigration ship, the SS Sinaia, to transport 1,600 Spanish Re-publican refugees who had been interned in con-centration camps in France since early February to a new life in Mexico as they could not return to Spain for fear of reprisals.3 Rather than viewing all refugees as equally deserving of emigration, the National Joint Committee prioritised the re-moval of intellectuals over manual labourers and farmers in order to preserve the Spanish Re-publican culture and way of life – an opinion that naturally followed the antifascist stance taken by the National Joint Committee from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

British Humanitarianism During and Following the Spanish Civil War

Although Britain was not directly involved in the Spanish Civil War, having signed the Non-Intervention Pact promising to remain neutral, the conflict attracted widespread attention and debate, and many Britons supported the effort through humanitarian aid to protest against non-intervention. One public opinion poll by the Brit-ish Institute of Public Opinion showed that by the end of the war, 73 per cent of Britain supported the Republicans (the legitimate Popular Front government that had been democratically elect-ed in February 1936) over the Nationalists (the rebels who began the war with a military coup led by Francisco Franco and who were support-ed by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy). The largest Spanish aid organisation in Britain, the National Joint Committee for Spanish Re-lief, aligned itself with the majority of the British public in supporting only the Republicans. While the National Joint Committee officially claimed to be non-political, the organisation united anyone who was antifascist regardless of party lines, mirroring the Popular Front of the Spanish Re-public, and it never sent aid to the Nationalists. It was formed in December 1936, just five months after the start of the Spanish Civil War, with a goal of acting as an umbrella agency and col-lecting money and goods-in-kind from all of the smaller efforts that had sprung up organically since the war began. By the end of the war, the National Joint Committee boasted a network of over 850 local, regional and national organisa-tions (cf . Fyrth 201, 203) . The political bias of the National Joint Com-mittee asserted itself most forcefully as the war ended in favour of the Nationalists and all of the agency’s workers left Spain alongside 500,000 Spanish refugees and fled into France. The refu-gees were immediately put into seaside concen-tration camps surrounded by barbed wire, with only sand and blankets for shelter.4 From these camps, the National Joint Committee was the only humanitarian organisation that turned its

How to Save a SocietyThe National Joint Committee’s Emigration Selection Process of 1939

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culture” (Faber 41). In exile, however, the plight of the Republican intellectuals and that of Span-ish culture were inextricably linked as “Spanish culture as embodied by the exiled intellectuals was equated with the nation’s being as a whole” (Faber 4).

Intellectual as a Construct of Value

The architects of societies are the thinkers and philosophers on which a society’s ideals are based, and in the case of the Spanish Repub-licans, this group of people were often labelled “intellectuals.” When trying to define “intellec-tuals,” it is useful to consider the ideas of the Italian Communist leader and thinker Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks, written be-tween 1929 and 1935, explained the role of a “functional intellectual”. Like the view of the Na-tional Joint Committee, Gramsci believed that the category of “intellectual” did not just include academics . Indeed, he stated, “[a]ll men are in-tellectuals […] but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals .” (Gramsci 9) This social function included not only those scientists, philosophers and artists of the highest level, but also at the lowest level the “administrators […] of pre-existing […] accumulated intellectual wealth” (Gramsci 13). Similarly, Nancy Cunard outlined the National Joint Committee’s definition of “in-tellectual” in the Manchester Guardian as includ-ing “writers, artists, lawyers, professors, doctors, architects, [and] engineers” (Cunard 7). The Na-tional Joint Committee desired to protect a core of functional intellectuals that, once transported to Mexico, could preserve and maintain Spanish Republican traditions before turning their atten-tion to the other refugees in danger . The prioritisation of those with an intellectual reputation over manual labourers and farmers directly contradicted the instructions given by the Mexican government, which had agreed to accept 40,000 Spanish refugees. Although in a 3 April 1939 announcement, the Mexican Gov-ernment stated that intellectuals “unquestionably deserved to be admitted,” they clarified that im-migrants who would be able to help exploit mar-i ne riches or develop tropical regions – in other words, farmers and fishermen – were preferred (cf. Smith 223-224, cf. Fagen 47). To further solidify the types of refugees desired, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas set the following quotas: 60 per cent were to be farmers and fish-ermen, 30 per cent were to be technicians and workers, and the remaining 10 per cent intellec-tuals (cf. Piña Soria 12-13). But Cárdenas great-ly underestimated the number of people defined

attention to solving the refugees’ long-term prob-lem by supporting immigration to Mexico rather than only alleviating their short-term problems by providing food, clothing and shelter. The pro-Republican political focus of the National Joint Committee allowed them to coordinate their efforts with the Spanish Government-in-exile in a mutually beneficial financial relationship. Dr. Juan Negrín, the Prime Minister of the last democratically elected Republican Government and leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party with strong ties to the Spanish Communist Party, had created an aid agency to support the Spanish refugees called the Spanish Republican Evacuation Service (SERE), and the two organ-isations co-chartered the SS Sinaia in May 1939 . For both the SERE and the National Joint Committee, this effort was a calculated emigra-tion of mostly intellectuals in an attempt to pre-serve Spanish Republican traditions since both organisations regarded Spanish refugee relief as the next phase in the fight against fascism. To this end, the National Joint Committee praised Mexico in an article in News Chronicle for having an “open-door” through which the problem of the Spanish refugees could be solved while allow-ing the refugees to “resume their own trades and professions in a land where the Spanish language and Spanish traditions prevail” (First Spanish Refugee Ship 9) . By Spanish traditions, the National Joint Committee referred to the culture of the Repub-licans’ political ideology – the recent Spanish Republican traditions of the Second Spanish Republic, established just eight years prior, in 1931. These relatively new “traditions” built on the cultural modernisation of the late nineteenth century when a growing middle class rebelled against the old order based on aristocratic land ownership and the Catholic Church and, instead, embraced progress and technology. Indeed, as Helen Graham notes, from the start of the Sec-ond Republic in 1931 until the outbreak of war in 1936, the government acquired loans to fund 27,000 new classrooms with teachers and im-plemented travelling “teaching missions” to tour the countryside, bringing “culture and politics” to Spain’s rural villages through “literacy classes, mobile libraries, travelling theatre exhibitions and civic education” (Graham 36). The Nation-alists, on the other hand, were supported by monarchists and the Catholic Church, institu-tions spanning centuries, pre-empting the con-cept of Spain as a nation and responsible for much of traditional Spanish culture in a war that historian Sebastiaan Faber says “was waged over the definition of Spain’s national commu-nity, that is, over two opposing interpretations of ‘Spanishness’ and the essence of Spanish

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The National Joint Committee’s Emigration Selection Process of 1939

shows 52 .86 per cent intellectuals, 25 .81 per cent technicians and workers and only 21 .31 per cent farmers and fishermen – percentages that completely ignored Cárdenas’s quotas (cf. Pla Brugat 51).

An Intellectual Emigration

Aboard the Sinaia, the presence of so many Spanish intellectuals manifested itself in a daily newsletter that mimicked the creation of news-letters in several of the concentration camps as well as continued the tradition of trench maga-zines along the Republican front lines.5 Susana Gamboa, the wife of the Mexican liaison to the SERE who travelled with the refugees, ensured all materials necessary for the production of a newsletter were loaded onto the ship . In the first issue, she welcomed the refugees with a charge to assume responsibility for their news-letter and improve it with their collective interests and input, and she laid out a cultural programme consisting of a series of lectures and festivals occurring during the two-week voyage (cf. Gam-boa 15). Along with the literary and artistic con-tributions of the refugees, every issue contained news from around the world as well as articles about Mexican geography, economics, educa-tion, society and culture, including several writ-ten by President Cárdenas. Articles written by the refugees in the news-letter often utilised the theme of emigration as a continuation of the war effort, mirroring the Na-tional Joint Committee’s and the SERE’s view of emigration, particularly this emigration of in-tellectuals. Basauri y Garriz’s article “Orienta-tions” commanded the rest of the refugees to maintain the Republican principles of morality, honesty and loyalty and ended with the declara-tion: “The Spaniards going to Mexico will never forget that in Spain are hundreds of thousands of imprison ed brothers, millions of oppressed Spaniards and a whole country to reconquer.” (Basauri y Garriz 47)6 Two issues later, in an ar-ticle entitled “New Stage of the Fight”, a refugee known only as A.M. described the immigration to Mexico as “a new stage of fighting between fascism and culture, between progress and re-action, between oppression and liberty. Mexico is our next trench.” (A.M. 59) Similarly, one week later in “Route to Mexico”, the author exhorted the other refugees: “We cannot forget, even for a moment, that our struggle for the liberation of the homeland has not finished, far from it. In the process of the Spanish revolution we must clear-ly understand that we have not done anything other than enter a new phase of the same fight.” (Rumbo a Mexico 101) The refugees believed

as “intellectuals.” The June 1939 bulletin of the National Joint Committee expanded the term, claiming the refugees included

known democrats, leaders of the Trade Unions and the Co-operative Societies, teachers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and artists who sympathised with the Re-publican cause. In the eyes of Franco, they are all criminals whose names have long been entered on the black list of persons who may expect no mercy at his hands . (National Joint Committee, 1939 1)

The National Joint Committee strove to remove these ‘danger-list’ intellectuals before France forced them to repatriate . In reality, the Franco legislation that applied to the Spanish refugees, the Law of Political Re-sponsibilities enacted on 9 February 1939, was aimed at former trade unionists as well as pol-itical ‘dissidents’ . This law imposed sentences retroactively upon anyone who had, since 1 Oc-tober 1934 (21 months prior to Franco’s coup), been part of a “political and social group which belonged to the Popular Front, the separ atist organisations, and all those which have op-posed the National movement”, including the main trade unions, CNT and UGT, and all pol-itical parties that did not support Franco . Other offences worth y of “loss of citizenship, forfeiture of property, and fifteen years imprisonment” in-cluded merely shouting “Long live the Repub-lic” in the street in March 1936, one month after the Republic’s legitimate election (de Lizaso). According to this law, then, all refugees in the French camps were in danger of reprisals if they returned to Spain, and many of these would also fall into Cárdenas’s categories of farmers and technicians. Yet, because the true objective of the National Joint Committee was removing in-tellectuals and preserving Republican society, intellectuals were prioritised over agricultural-ists who had not supported Franco in the years before his coup or workers who had been trade union members. Using Cárdenas’s quotas, the Sinaia’s 1,600 passengers should have numbered 960 farm-ers and fishermen, 480 technicians and workers and only 160 intellectuals. However, later stat-istics from the voyage showed an illiteracy rate of only 1 .1 per cent (cf . Ruiz Funes and Tuñón 191). While Republican education programmes had improved the educational system of Spain greatly during the Second Republic, over half the population had been illiterate in 1931; and such a small percentage of illiterates on the Sinaia in 1939 further testifies to the type of men and women it carried (cf . Education in Republican Spain 4). Furthermore, a breakdown of profes-sions aboard the Sinaia by Dolores Pla Brugat

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as the many studies of exile culture in Mexico attest, even the Spaniards who could no longer earn a living through cultural pursuits continued their intellectual endeavours in defence of their political ideology .

Conclusions on Reputation and Humanitarianism

Although the National Joint Committee for Span-ish Relief often promoted itself as a neutral, non-political humanitarian organisation, if Barnett and Weiss’s criterion of saving individuals versus saving societies is used, it was clearly political as it strove to save Republican society by prioritis-ing intellectuals. Being a ‘political’ aid organisa-tion, however, should not be viewed negatively. In fact, it was the political nature of the National Joint Committee that allowed them to remove 1,600 refugees from the concentration camps in France and give them hope of a new life in Mexico, even if these refugees were chosen pri-marily due to their reputations as intellectuals . For those hundreds of thousands of refugees remaining in the camps, the future was bleak. While many eventually returned to Spain to face possible reprisals, others joined the French for-eign legion or were drafted into labour compa-nies. At the start of the Second World War, secu-rity tightened even further, and with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the communist refugees were transferred to prison camps and the SERE was forced to cease operations . Finally, as Ger-many conquered France in 1940, 12,000 Span-ish refugees were transported to Mauthausen, with only 1,600 exiting alive at the end of the war (cf . Russell 9) . And although Franco died in 1975, having never been forced out of his dicta-torship, Spain transitioned back to the monarchy that predated the Second Republic.Kerrie Holloway is a PhD candidate in History at Queen Mary University of London, working with Dr. Helen McCarthy. Her thesis looks at the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, a British voluntary organisation aiding the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

1 The most prominent example of this is the International Committee of the Red Cross, which adopted seven core principles – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality – at the 1965 Inter-national Conference in Vienna. See Jean Pictet’s The Fun-damental Principles of the Red Cross: Commentary .

2 A similar example to the one given in this article is the preferential treatment given to well-known Jewish scientists and musicians fleeing the Nazi regime who were allowed to leave legally, sponsored by large organisations, while the majority of ordinary Jewish families wishing to flee were forced to remain in Germany. See Gurock’s volume on the Holocaust . More recent examples include the response to

emigration would create a culture-in-exile and preserve their society, paralleling the view of the National Joint Committee. The on-board newsletter mentioned the Na-tional Joint Committee several times, referring to it as the “British Committee”, and documented a festival given in its honour just before arrival in Veracruz . In an article entitled “Work of the British Committee”, William Brebner, one of the two National Joint Committee workers who ac-companied the Sinaia to Mexico, asserted that the funds for the voyage were due to workers and the English people in general . In response, the author vowed to “match the work of the Brit-ish Committee, representing the spirit and efforts of the British anti-fascist workers”, a direct ac-knowledgement to the political character of the National Joint Committee (Labor del Comité Bri-tánico 106) . On 11 June 1939, the refugees held a festival in honour of the British Committee with poetry readings and a concert complete with the British anthem, “God save the King”, during which the refugees gave the British Committee a standing ovation (El festival 118) . The next day, on the eve of arrival in Mexico, a similar festival honoured Susana Gamboa and Mexico’s hospi-tality . The Sinaia arrived in Veracruz on 13 June 1939 after three weeks at sea . Richard Rees, another British relief worker, met the Sinaia in Veracruz . Rees travelled to Mexico for the National Joint Committee to re-port on the conditions into which the Mexican Government placed the refugees before the Na-tional Joint Committee undertook further immi-grations to Mexico. Specifically, Rees was to re-port on the viability of Cárdenas’s plan to send a family of Spanish refugees to each ejido, or rural community, throughout the countryside so as not to overburden any one area of Mexico with their maintenance. In his report to the Foreign Office, Rees stated: “As there are 40,000 ejidos this looks like a good solution – on paper. But not all the Spanish refugees would be suitable for the life .” (19 June 1939) In particular, the intellectu-als that the National Joint Committee had worked tirelessly to send to safety were ofte n the ones left without work, and furthermore, spreading the intellectuals throughout Mexico negated the National Joint Committee’s desire to preserve a Republican society. Almost a month afte r his first report, Rees’s second report stated: “There has been little difficulty in settling the agriculturalists and manual workers. But there are several hun-dred professional workers (engineers, lawyers, teachers, etc .) in Mexico City who have not yet been placed.” (25 July 1939) Most of these in-tellectuals eventually found work by switching to industry or business, and often their intelligence produced a rapid rise to executive positions and financial success (cf. Fagen 57). Nevertheless,

Kerrie Holloway

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The National Joint Committee’s Emigration Selection Process of 1939

National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. “New Hope for Spanish Refugees.” Spanish Relief: Bulletin of the National Joint Committee 19, June 1939: 1 .

Piña Soria, Antolín. El presidente Cárdenas y la inmigración de Españoles republicanos. México: Multígrafos SCOP, 1939 .

“Report on the Emigration of Spanish refugees to Mexico”, 19 June 1939. Located at the National Archives (London), FO 371/24157, W 10552/2694/41.

Rees, Richard. “Report on the Evacuation of Spanish refu-gees to Mexico”, 25 July 1939. Located at the National Ar-chives (London), FO 371/24157, W 11274/2694/41.

“Rumbo a México.” Sinaia 15, 9 June 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipanema’ y el ‘Mexique’. Ed. Fernando Serrano Migallón. México, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 101 .

Russell, Sam. “Spaniards in the Death Camps.” Volunteer for Liberty 6.5, November-December 1945: 9.

Villegas, Jean-Claude, Ed. Plages d’Exil: Les Camps de Ré-fugiés Espagnols en France, 1939. Nanterre: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, 1989.

Secondary Sources

Barnett, Michael, and Thomas G. Weiss. “Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present.” Humanitarianism in Ques-tion: Politics, Power, Ethics. Eds. Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008. 1-48.

Brunsma, David L. et al. The Sociology of Katrina: Perspec-tives on a Modern Catastrophe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.

Faber, Sebastiaan. Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2002.

Fagen, Patricia W . Exiles and Citizens: Spanish Republicans in Mexico. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1973.

Fyrth, Jim . The Signal Was Spain: The Spanish Aid Move-ment in Britain, 1936-1939 . London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986 .

Graham, Helen . The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 . Cambridge: UP, 2002.

Gurock, Jeffrey. America, American Jews, and the Holo-caust. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Pictet, Jean . The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross: Commentary. Geneva: Henry Dunant Institute, 1979.

Pla Brugat, Dolores. “El Exilio Español en México: Una Mi-rada Sobre el Común de los Refugiados.” Historias 53, September-December 2002: 49-64.

Ruiz Funes, Concepción, and Enriqueta Tuñón . Palabras del Exilio 2. Final y Comienzo: El Sinaia. México, D. F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, SEP, Librerá Madero, 1982 .

Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo. “Recordando al Sinaia .” Sinaia: Diario de la primera expedición de republicanos españoles a México . Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Espa-ña, 1999. 9-17.

Smith, Lois Elwyn. “Mexico and the Spanish Republicans.” University of California Publications in Political Science 4, 1953-1955. Ed. J. C. Bollens et al. Berkeley, CA: UP, 1955. 165-315.

the 9/11 attacks on New York City in 2001 in which the Feder-al Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been criti-cised for an unequal distribution of funds, prioritising wealthy Manhattan neighbourhoods while ignoring minority and low-income areas . These same arguments reappeared in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. See Brunsma et al.

3 The Sinaia was the first mass emigration ship purport-ing to transport ‘regular’ refugees to Mexico, but not the first emigration ship . Indeed, a previous ship transported eminent intellectuals who underwent a rigorous selection process . The mass emigrations, however, were to reflect the social, ideological, political and professional diversity of the ordinary Spanish population. See Sánchez Vázquez.

4 Using the term “concentration camp” rather than “refu-gee camp” or “internment camp” is a contentious issue . However, this term will continue to be used throughout this article due to its contemporary and continual use by those who were in the camps . To discontinue the use of the term in deference to the Nazi camps disrespects the memoirs of the Spanish refugees who lived through camps they considered “concentration camps” in 1939 and subsequent decades.

5 For examples of the camp newsletters, see Villegas .

6 All translations are mine .

Works Cited

Primary Sources

A. M. “Nueva etapa de lucha.” Sinaia 8, 2 June 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipa-nema’ y el ‘Mexique’. Ed. Fernando Serrano Migallón. Mé-xico, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 59.

Basauri y Garriz. “Orientaciones.” Sinaia 6, 31 May 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipanema’ y el ‘Mexique’. Ed. Fernando Serrano Migallón. México, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 47.

“British Institute of Public Opinion Polls, 1939.” UKDA. SN: 2038. 2 November 2015 <http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-2038-1>.

Cunard, Nancy. “New Homes for Over 400,000 Spanish Refu gees .” Manchester Guardian 12 May 1939: 7 .

de Lizaso, Jose I . “Letter to Editor .” 22 March 1939 . Lo-cated at the Archives of the Trades Union Congress, 292/946/12b/48.

Education in Republican Spain: A Brief Survey . London: United Editorial, 1938.

“El festival de ayer, en honor del Comité Británico.” Sinaia 18, 12 June 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipanema’ y el ‘Mexique’ . Ed . Fernando Serrano Migallón. México, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 118 .

“First Spanish Refugee Ship Sails Today.” News Chronicle 23 May 1939: 9 .

Gamboa, Susana. “¡Españoles republicanos a bordo del ‘Sinaia’!” Sinaia 1, 26 May 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipanema’ y el ‘Mexique’ . Ed. Fernando Serrano Migallón. México, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 15 .

Gramsci, Antonio . Prison Notebooks . London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971 .

“Labor del Comité Británico.” Sinaia 16, 10 June 1939 . Los Barcos de la Libertad: Diarios de Viaje del ‘Sinaia’, el ‘Ipa-nema’ y el ‘Mexique’. Ed. Fernando Serrano Migallón. Mé-xico, D. F.: El Colegio de México, 2006: 106.

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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2016/QMR/12

The harsh realities of the Second World War left many children displaced, orphaned and aban-doned by war’s end. Many children in Nazi-an-nexed territories and collaborationist regimes were hoarded onto trains and deported to con-centration camps. Others were born on enemy territory to forced labourers and prisoners of war. In Germany itself, where many had witnessed the horrors of aerial bombing, countless chil-dren sought refuge in shelled-out buildings and crowded cellars . And then there were the “stolen children”, children who were hiding in plain sight . Victims of wartime atrocities, these children of unknown parentage and background were up-rooted from their countries of origin and sent to Nazi institutions to be racially examined and Germanised before being placed with German foster families under new identities . Stolen children quickly became a hotly con-tested subject for the governments, military au-thorities and humanitarian agencies that were mandated to locate and care for displaced per-sons and refugees during the postwar occupa-tion of Germany. The problem of children, both those who were reunited with parents and close relatives after the war and those who remained displaced, orphaned or abandoned throughout the occupation period, posed a serious threat to postwar reconstruction . Although postwar re-construction, the very corner stone of the military occupation as a whole, was often a matter of re-building shattered infra structure (often brick by brick), it also encompassed a moral dimension, one that became entrenched in the very institu-tions that cared for children during the postwar period. As the occupation began to take shape and the sheer size and scope of the stolen child problem became clearer, practices and policies were quickly implemented to clothe and feed them, to trace and locate them, to rehabilitate and repatriate them, and, if necessary, to re-settle them in new countries. But the debates surrounding stolen children were intensely po-litical and clashing, and often questioned the reputations of the German foster parents who took these children in . Questions soon emerged

about where a child rightfully belonged and with whom, leading to irreconcilable differences in policy between the occupation authorities and humanitarian agencies that were mandated to search, locate, and care for these children throughout the course of the postwar period .

Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention

The French, British and American military gov-ernments had total authority over the displaced persons, refugees, and unaccompanied children found in their respective German occupation zones. It was the United Nations Relief and Re-habilitation Administration (UNRRA), however, that acted as the principle humanitarian organ-isation during the post-military period until oper-ations were resumed by the International Refu-gee Organization (IRO), UNRRA’s successor organisation, in July 1947 .1 From 1945 to 1950, under the direct orders of the western occupation authorities, UNRRA and IRO were respon sible for coordinating the health, welfare, registration, administration and repatriation of all United Na-tions refugees and displaced persons found in enemy or ex-enemy territory. The principle goal of UNRRA and IRO was repatriation . A massive undertaking, since there were an estimated 9,000,000 people displaced by war by 1944, UNRRA had hoped to repatriate up to 35,000 refugees and displaced persons a day within the first six to seven months of the post-military period with the help of the military authorities, the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and the International Red Cross (UNRRA and its Tasks 9 September 1944). Be-tween May 1945 and July 1947, on the eve of IRO takeover, nearly 7,000,000 displaced per-sons and refugees had been repatriated.2 By 31 May 1946, 5,888,400 refugees and displaced persons had been repatriated from German as-sembly centres while a further 792,850 remained behind, creating a group of non-repatriable

Hiding in Plain SightStolen Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention in Postwar Germany (1945-1949)

Katherine Rossy

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central tracing index, but a lack of search par-ameters and key information about the children in question made child search a truly painstaking undertaking . Following thousands of inquiries from fran-tic parents, the Child Search branch of UNR-RA’s Central Tracing Bureau began operations in Janu ary 1946 with a three-person staff. By March 1946, 1,000 children of UN origin were recovered, and by July, there were six Child Search Teams each composed of up to fifteen members who spoke a combined 27 languages. By 1 June, nearly 10,000 children were locat-ed .6 The Bureau was extremely short-staffed, however. Of the 5,372 UNRRA employees who worked in headquarters and in the field, only 89 personnel worked in the Central Trac-ing Bureau.7 A general lack of coordination between UNRRA, IRO, and the western occu-pation authorities further complicated search ef-forts, as the military authorities had a final say in all matters concerning unaccompanied chil-dren and no child could be moved, repatriated or resettled without their consent . The Ameri-can and British military authorities authorised UNRRA to carry out child search and tracing operations in the American and British zones as early as September 1945. The French did not follow suit and restricted UNRRA child search activities to UNRRA-administered camps, thus opting for total control over displaced persons and refugees found in their occupation zone . Despite operational differences across the three western zones, an attempt was made to central-ise Child Search by establishing a Child Tracing Bureau in Frankfurt-Höchst before its relocation to Bad Arolsen in 1946, where it remains in op-eration today .8

Postwar child search was often “conducted by a system of trial and error”, as one August 1948 report on refugee children pointed out .9 Welfare officers were advised against “direct questioning of the child” and were instead instructed to use “indirect methods” to obtain clues and data about children’s identities .10 This meant that investiga-tors had to be most creative in their approach:

To winnow out facts and track down clues, an investigator must combine qualities as linguist, child psychologist, and detective . Often, when speaking German to a child, investigators casually drop a question in Polish, French or Czech . The child replies in the same tongue sometimes, providing the first clue that may lead eventually to a reunion with family members. Some-times remembrance has been rekindled by a snatch of a folk song or a native lul-laby. (Europe’s Greatest Treasure Hunt 15 Janu ary 1949)

‘hard-core’ refugees who refused to return to their homes in Eastern Europe, opting instead to take advantage of new immigration and resettle-ment schemes in the West .3 Under the terms of its agreement with Euro-pean UN member states in July 1944, UNRRA would act as “the central international organ for coordinating the work of repatriating Displaced Persons in Europe .”4 But relief and rehabilita-tion were privileges that extended only to those deemed eligible to receive UNRRA assistance. Stateless persons forced to flee their homes and United Nations nationals who were displaced by war outside their countries of origin were eligible to receive UNRRA assistance. With the excep-tion of displaced Italian nationals, all those from enemy or ex-enemy nations, including Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Romania and Siam, were not eligible for UNRRA assist-ance and were thus excluded from the mandate . This also included ethnic Germans and German Balts, war criminals, collaborators and traitors, nationals of neutral countries, and ex-Wehr-macht personnel. These eligibility criteria formed the basis of the IRO mandate as well. That Germans were excluded from UN aid exposes a fundamental reality of postwar hu-manitarian culture, one in which humanitarian intervention was rooted, at least in part, by a deep scepticism of the German population. Un-certainty toward how best to differentiate a Nazi from an anti-Nazi, a sympathiser from a critic, a victim from a perpetrator, and a collaborator from a resister shaped nearly every facet of the Ger-man occupation programme . The very intentions of the German people were heavily scrutinised and their reputations were carefully weighted . This was especially true in matters concerning the search for stolen children, that is, “racially valuable” children of suspicious origin who were believed to be uprooted by the Nazis and placed with “racially deserving” German foster families after undergoing racial testing and Germanisa-tion. Since the true identities of ‘stolen’ children were deliberately concealed and erased, these children would prove the hardest to locate and repatriate . The two main components of stolen children’s policy in occupied Germany were child tracing and child search.5 Child tracing usually invol ved locating an individual child based on clues and information received from parents or close rela-tives . Clues were then checked against a central tracing index that contained tens of thousands of identity papers, photographs, letters and cap-tured German documents. Searching for a child, on the other hand, usually involved a mass, col-lective search for an undetermined number of children whose names and identities were not yet known . Any leads were again checked against a

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Stolen Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention in Postwar Germany

during the war . The couple was assured that the child was “pure Aryan-German”, only to discover after the war that “the child was not Johann Atz-mann, but a foundling from a bombed out area” of Yugoslavia.14 One particularly difficult case in-volved a German couple from Aerzen who had adopted a young girl named Editha . In 1947, she was discovered to be an illegitimate child of a presumably German father and an Italian moth-er who returned to Italy in 1945 and never at-tempted to contact her daughter again . When an UNRRA child search officer visited Editha’s fos-ter parents to make plans for the removal of the child, the adoptive mother threatened to commit suicide if the child were taken away. The officer returned to collect the child one month later, only to discover that the mother had disappeared with Editha, causing UNRRA to close the case since it would have been “inhumane to take the child away owing to personal feelings .”15

Stolen and hidden children were not easy to identify, as they were not usually war-ravaged and malnourished, like many displaced and refugee children who lived in overcrowded camps and in-stitutions during the immediate postwar period . A study conducted by Denise Grunewald, an IRO Child Welfare Officer, found that most stolen chil-dren were surprisingly “well treated” since they were “placed with a desiring family who wanted to adopt and received more love and care than a child killed by a bomb.”16 Such findings did little to prevent heated debates from emerging on both sides of the moral spectrum, however. To whom did these children belong if they had, indeed, been stolen, and how could one pos-sibly hope to answer such a difficult question? The easiest solution, Grunewald argued, would be for the military authorities to turn a blind eye and leave the children where they were found in order to avoid uprooting them again. But “would this also not make us complicit in what the Allied Military Tribunal has called a crime against hu-manity?”17 Forced removal and repatriation did not seem like logical solutions either: “To repat-riate them only to put them back in institutions – would this not obey a logic of narrow nation-alism and, when all is said and done, of political vengeance which must not be the driving force behind an international social organisation, and which must in no case put children at stake?”18 Another report asks similar questions: “Is there harm to a child in once more disrupting him from a family, in which he now seems entrenched? In striving to send a child in all haste to the country to which he belongs, is the motive some obscure punitive attitude toward the German people as a whole, or is the concern for the child upper-most in the planning?”19 Such questions echoed throughout many of the humanitarian practices of the postwar period .

Some children, depending on age, memory and behavioural habits, could provide useful informa-tion .11 But others, like little Pierre Roget, a young Jewish boy who was taken across the Pyrenees during the war by an underground resistance worker, could provide no information at all:

The story of a three-and-a-half year old boy who had made the hazardous trip across is a very poignant one and points up the whole tragedy involved in Europe today. No one knew his name when he came in and couldn’t help because he had forgotten it. Obviously he hadn’t been called by name for some time – his par-ents weren’t with him and he was alone in the group . We tried calling him everything – Jean, Claude, Robert and so on. Final-ly, it was decided to call him Pierre since he stirred up a little response at that; and so he became Pierre Roget. About three weeks later the mystery was cleared when his mother came in to claim him, and “Pierre” became Charles once again. But that is an example of thousands of similar tragedies all over Europe .12

Fortuitously, little Pierre Roget was happily re-united with his mother. But many children, most of whom had no papers in their posses-sion or were too young or traumatised to pro-vide clues about their backgrounds, suffered a different fate. Although such cases required a great deal of detec tive work, since these chil-dren could provide frustratingly little information, the discovery of “accidental clues” often led to breakthroughs. In one case, a priest requested UNRRA medical supplies for thirty tubercular chil-dren who were housed in a German institution . After an investigation of the institution was car-ried out, UNRRA workers discovered that nine-teen of the children were, in fact, Allied nation als, and clues to the whereabouts of a further two hundred Allied children were discovered by inter-viewing the nuns who worked at the institution .13

The ‘Best Interests’ of the Child

The Nazi Germanisation apparatus was de-signed to erase all signs of a child’s past, which in turn made it extremely difficult for humanitar-ian workers, military authorities, and relatives to track down and recuperate stolen children . Many German foster parents were genuinely shocked to discover that the children under their care were actually Yugoslavian, Czech, Italian, French, Polish or Belgian children who were up-rooted and displaced from their home countries only to somehow wind up in German institutions . In one case, a child by the name of Johann Atz-mann was adopted by an elderly German couple

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The issue of stolen children raises key ques-tions regarding the practices and particularities of humanitarian intervention and military occu-pation during the post-military period. The sus-picious origins of stolen children, coupled with the contested reputations of those who took them in, generates something of a conundrum . Could these children have been stolen children from Poland, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, for example, or were they actually German war or-phans? Were German foster parents aware of the circumstances under which stolen children wound up in German institutions and, eventually, in their homes, or were they as oblivious as the occupation authorities and humanitarian work-ers who later carried out child search and trac-ing policies? Who was in a position to rightfully claim stolen children whose parents could not be found? Was it truly in the best interests of the child to uproot him or her from the only home he or she had ever known, only to be repatriated to a place he or she may not have been able to remember? These questions underscore some of the most contentious issues of the postwar period, leaving the fates of stolen children in the hands of the families that searched for them, the authorities that cared for them, and the nations that claimed them . Katherine Rossy is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Can-ada Doctoral Scholar. Her doctoral thesis exam-ines occupation policy toward unaccompanied children in the French and British occupation zones in postwar Germany between 1945 and 1949 .

1 “Agreement between UNRRA and SHAEF”, 14 October 1944, AJ/43/14.

2 Section VIII, June 1948, AJ/43/170.

3 Appendix I, 8 July 1946, AJ/43/19.

4 “Draft for a Multi-Lateral Agreement between the Euro-pean United Nations concerning the Care and Maintenance and Repatriation of Displaced Persons in their Territories who are Nationals of the United Nations”, July 1944, AJ/43/16.

5 “Child Search Programme”, 13 October 1950, AJ/43/302.

6 “UNRRA Fifth Session of the Council”, 8 July 1946, AJ/43/19.

7 Appendix VII, 8 July 1946, AJ/43/19.

8 “UNRRA Weekly Bulletin”, 31 January 1945, AJ/43/18.

9 “Refugee Children, Summary Report”, 10-16 August 1948, AJ/43/598-599.

10 Ibid.

11 “Quels sont les principaux problèmes concernant les en-fants réfugiés?”, July 1948, AJ/43/598-599.

12 “J.D.C. Overseas Representatives Re-Affirms Hopes of Jewish Refugees”, 21 March 1945, AJ/43/13.

13 “UNRRA Fifth Session of the Council”, 8 July 1946, AJ/43/19.

The occupation authorities were equally div-ided . Opinions clashed in May 1948 when Myer Cohen, the head of the Preparatory Commit-tee of the IRO, met with representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom and France to discuss issues surrounding the search for unaccompanied children .20 While all represen-ta tives agreed, at least in theory, that children with known relatives should be repatriated at the earliest opportunity, the representatives could not agree over a suitable course of action in instances where parents could not be located. Mr. Squadrilli, the American representative, stat-ed that unaccompanied children with no known relatives in the American zone were usually re-ferred to the National Liaison Officer of his or her determined country of origin to be consid-ered for resettlement . Commandant de Rosen, the French representative, protested that if no parents could be located, the government of ori-gin should have the right to claim children up to the age of sixteen; he strongly disagreed with the view that a child happily settled in a German foster home should remain there and anticipat-ed that there were likely thousands of children to be found since the Nazis did not exterminate ‘racially valuable’ kidnapped children.21 Brigad-ier Kenchington, the British representative, ex-pressed that while the Foreign Office generally agreed with the French viewpoint, and while nationality was extremely important, repatriation should not override the will or the best interests of the child .22

The “best interests of the child” became a mantra of the postwar perio d . All UN mem-ber states, except Belgium, agreed in principle that stolen children living with German fami-lies must return home, however the occupa-tion author ities had the final say on the sub-ject . Although they never formally “express[ed] their policy in writing”, it was decided that Child Search and Tracing would operate on a case-by-case basis, often through a system of trial-and-error, while relying on the guiding principle of the ‘best interests’ of the child.23

Concluding Thoughts

Limited funds meant that Child Search and Trac-ing could only operate until 31 July 1950, leaving several thousand cases unturned . All repatria-tion and resettlement plans were to be finalised by 31 July 1951.24 As of 1 June 1950, a central-ised German tracing service for children was set up in Hamburg in the Federal Republic of Ger-many, and the Allied High Commission took on all unsolved cases on 1 April 1951 .25

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Stolen Children, Reputation and Humanitarian Intervention in Postwar Germany

Archives

Les Archives nationales (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France):Archives pour l’Organisation internationale pour les réfugiés:

AJ/43/13, AJ/43/14, AJ/43/16

AJ/43/18, AJ/43/19, AJ/43/170

AJ/43/301, AJ/43/302, AJ/43/596-597

AJ/43/598-599

The National Archives (Kew, United Kingdom):The Foreign Office, Control Commission for Germany (British Element):

FO 1052/358

Works Cited

“The Saga of Europe’s Greatest Treasure Hunt.” Stars and Stripes 15 January 1949 .

“UNRRA and its Tasks.” The Times 9 September 1944.

14 “War Crimes report on ‘Lebensborn’”, 24 October 1947, AJ/43/596-597.

15 “Report on Mr. and Mrs. Friedrich ALBERT, foster-par-ents of SCARFATTI, Editha”, 12 August 1947, FO 1052/358.

16 “Etudes sur le Lebensborn”, 1 July 1948, AJ/43/598-599.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 “Removal from German Families of Allied Children . Rea-sons Why This Is in the Best Interest of the Child”, 21 Janu-ary 1948, AJ/43/598-599.

20 “Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization, First Session”, 19 February 1947, AJ/43/170.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 “Removal from German Families of Allied Children . Rea-sons Why This Is in the Best Interest of the Child”, 21 Janu-ary 1948, AJ/43/598-599.

24 “Report of Child Care Conference”, 9-10 July 1951, AJ/43/301.

25 “International Tracing Service”, 9 April 1951, AJ/43/302.

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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2016/QMR/13

Introduction

This paper is concerned with heroism and ce-lebrity – two kinds of reputation in the sense of “cultural constructions” that reflect “the values and ideologies of the societies in which they are produced” (Cubitt 3). The Victoria Cross imbues its recipients with a very solid and uncontested heroic reputation:1 It is a decoration awarded for exceptional bravery in the armed forces of the Commonwealth . In 2011, a recipient of the medal, Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, one of the most highly decorated serving soldiers in the British Army, participated in the sixth series of a television celebrity entertainment show, Dancing on Ice (ITV 2006-2014).2 In an interview cover-ing the story leading up to his participation, the war hero was asked whether he felt like a ce-lebrity himself, now that he was competing with celebrities on television. In his reply, he clarified: “I am a soldier .3 And I’ll always remain a soldier .” (British Forces TV 2011)4 This answer suggests that Beharry considers the term “celebrity” as in-appropriate for himself – although he has no ob-jection to competing with celebrities on television – and we might infer that his solid reputation as a “hero” is perceived as incongruent with the repu-tation of a “celebrity”. This was also suggested in the Call for Papers for the seventh Queen Mary University of London – Freiburg PhD Colloquium:

The notion of glory or fame has become an […] unfamiliar one . Today men and women seek celebrity status or try to cre-ate a public image for themselves which appeals to their fans, admirers or – in politics – voters, but they do not con sider personal glory as a kind of reputation that is – potentially – forever and attested by a social community […] . Intimacy would make it impossible to consider somebody as a true hero. (Call for Papers 1-2)

In this light, being labelled as a celebrity seems to imply a loss of honour as well as serious dam-age to a heroic reputation, and we might con-clude that a reputation as a celebrity is regarded

as inferior to a heroic reputation in contemporary society. The two concepts seem to be perceived not only as mutually exclusive – although they are sometimes used synonymously (cf . Kelly 724) – but also as hierarchical. The alleged contradiction between hero and celebrity is the focus of this paper. My aim is to show that a hero can function as a celebrity without damage to his heroic reputation . John-son Beharry’s story and his representations in the British media will serve as a test case for this assumption. Indeed, in Beharry’s case, his reputation as a celebrity constantly reminded the public of his heroic reputation and thereby re-inforced his heroisation. Functioning as a celeb-rity helped Beharry to become firmly established as a hero in British society.

“Hero” and “Celebrity”: A Contradiction in Terms?

Trevor Parry-Giles, who worked on the percep-tion of J.K. Rowling’s fictional character Harry Potter as a celebrity figure, both within the fic-tional framework and in British society, found that the public is eager to distinguish between hero and celebrity. Parry-Giles defines celebrity as a “system of representation – its conventions, structures and circulation – within which the ce-lebrity self resonates within the public sphere” (Parry-Giles 307).5 Another characteristic of ce-lebrities can be identified by the public reaction: “the reaction to celebrities is affective, character-ised by the non-rational, the emotional” (Parry- Giles 308), and because emotions are powerful and seductive, celebrities are perceived as po-tentially dangerous . In short, there is a cultural uncertainty about celebrities and their function in and for society (cf. Parry-Giles 308). A hero, on the other hand, can be defined as

any man or woman whose existence, whether in his or her own lifetime or late r, is endowed by others, not just with a high degree of fame and honour, but with a

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is in the shape of a cross to which a red ribbon is attached. In the centre of the cross, Saint Ed-ward’s crown is guarded by a lion and encircled by the inscription “FOR VALOUR”.7 “Deliberate-ly intended to have little actual value, the VC is hand-made, traditionally using bronze taken from a gun captured in the Crimean War.” (Im-perial War Museum 2015)8 With the inception of the Victoria Cross, military heroism became a standardised and institutionalised entity in the British Empire (cf. Smith 29). As in 1857, today’s recipients of the medal are invested with the highest degree of fame and honour by the mon-arch in an official ceremony at Buckingham Pal-ace. Their heroic deeds are described in detail and read aloud, and the ceremony is broadcast on television. The official citation is then publish-ed in the London Gazette by the Ministry of De-fence . With this ceremony, the recipients are of-ficially and publically presented as heroes who have rightfully earned their heroic reputation . Victoria Cross recipients are not simply heroes . The Imperial War Museum in London pres ents them as “Extraordinary Heroes”9 since the Victoria Cross is only awarded for actions under direct enemy fire. It is therefore rare for Victoria Cross heroes to receive the award them-selves as they are frequently awarded posthu-mously. The recipients are therefore members of a very exclusive community (cf. Smith 41). Their singularity was emphasised with the opening of the largest collection of Victoria Crosses in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery at the Imperial War Mu-seu m in London in 2010. The exhibition “Extra-ordinary Heroes” has the agenda to “intrigue, inspire and amaze by re-telling forgotten stories of bravery that show, when faced with extreme situations, some people can do extraordinary things .” (The Imperial War Museum 2015)10 It displays the medals, as well as personal belong-ings of the recipients that helped them carry out their acts of bravery. Furthermore, visitors are told about the heroes’ acts of valour with the help of multimedia representations, including panels, short films, leaflets and even comic books. Their heroism is explained with such character traits as boldness, aggression, leadership, skill, sac-rifice, initiative and endurance.11 Victoria Cross heroism is redefined and adapted for today’s context of the post-9/11 wars. The public is in-formed in detail and the Victoria Cross heroes are supposed to serve as inspiration for them . The public’s “collective emotional investment” (Cubitt 3) is thus deliberately triggered. The ex-hibition transforms Victoria Cross heroes into popular figures who enjoy a heroic reputation. On 17 March 2005, Private Johnson Gideon Beharry was invested with the Victoria Cross by Queen Elizabeth II for twice saving members of his unit from ambushes on 1 May and 11 June

special allocation of imputed meaning and symbolic significance – that not only raise s them above others in public esteem but makes them the object of some kind of collective emotional investment. (Cubitt 3)

It is noteworthy that the emotional reaction of the public is central to the definitions of both hero and celebrity. Both figures also fulfil a cul-tural function for the public and function only within the public framework; they are therefore subject to media representation. It is the media representation which makes them a hero and/or a celebrity. However, a hero is distinguished from a celebrity by the notion of honour. Honour is what makes a hero appear as a trustworthy figure. In contrast to a celebrity, a hero is per-ceived as someone who is admired for being “truly virtuous and brave, rather than simply well-known” (Parry -Giles 311). Accordingly, a hero transcends the purely affective reaction of the public and provides his public with a reasonable justification for their admiration. The distinction between hero and celebrity is thus made in analogy to the distinction between the reasonable and the irrational, and the latter carries a rather negative connotation . Addition-ally, a moral judgement is at the heart of the distinction: heroes are considered as morally good and are therefore also considered as role models. They confirm a society’s moral code. Celebrities, on the other hand, are considered as a bad influence because they are famous with-out neces sarily being morally good. They are no models to be imitated – despite their public admiration. In consequence, celebrity culture is perceived as “a culture of artifice and deception where authentic heroism and real courage are ignored or minimised” (Parry-Giles 315). Follow-ing such criteria, a hero cannot be a celebrity. Accepting the label celebrity would equal an adoption of all the negative connotations and immoralities it carries . It would mean serious damage to a hero ic reputation. This explains Be-harry’s rejection of the label celebrity for himself: he prefers to remain a “soldier hero”,6 and spe-cifically a hero awarded with the highest military decoration in the British honours system.

The Victoria Cross Hero

On 29 January 1856, Queen Victoria introduced the Victoria Cross to officially recognise acts of gallantry and heroism independent of the recipi-ent’s origin, birth or class, “in recognition of the sacrifices made by the soldiers and sailors of the Crimean War” (Smith 26). Prior to the Victoria Cross, only high ranking military officers could be invested with an award for valour. The medal

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The Hero as Celebrity

In addition to these institutional and symbolic acts, Beharry has also been in the spotlight of celebrity media and literature. The representa-tion of the military in popular media is a recent phenomenon and has increased with the in-volvement of British troops in post-9/11 wars in order to “present militarism as necessary and natural extensions of nation-states’ civil society” (Kelly 723) . According to the public’s perception of hero versus celebrity referred to above, Be-harry’s representation as a celebrity in a dance show should have damaged his heroic reputa-tion, also because it revealed intimate and emo-tional details of his private life, which, following the argument, make it impossible to regard him as a ‘hero’ henceforth . However, the opposite seems to be true. In the same year as Beharry unveiled his por-trait, he also published his biography Barefoot Soldier (2007), written in collaboration with Nick Cook. Beharry reveals that his origins are hum-ble and that he had a difficult childhood. Due to his alcoholic and violent father, his family was too poor to afford shoes for their eight children. Beharry’s and Jim Eldridge’s novel Hero: The Incredible True Story of Courage Under Fire (2014) is an adaptation of Beharry’s story for a young readership, where Beharry is the narrator, focaliser and heroic protagonist. The plot is div-ided into two parts: Beharry’s childhood in Gren-ada and his mission in Iraq . Consequently, the reader gets insight into the protagonist’s child-hood traumas, such as the separation from his mother, and the suffering from a violent father and poverty. The novel’s fictionalisation also en-ables the reader to identify with the hero’s emo-tions and fears during his mission in Iraq. In both the biography and the novel, readers learn that Beharry saw the military as an institution where he might overcome his drug and alcohol addic-tion: “If I joined the army it would solve all my problems at a stroke. […] I’ll also get a reason-able wage, but best of all, I’ll break completely with the past” (Beharry/Eldridge 144-145). Both books narrate Beharry’s story of becoming a true hero and climax in the narration of his heroic deed. Moreover, both books end their narratives with the Victoria Cross ceremony at Buckingham Palace – the official recognition of the hero by the Queen: “‘You’re a very special person,’ she says, as she pins the medal on my chest . ‘It’s been rather a long time since I’ve awarded one of these’.” (Beharry/Eldridge 218) Both the biog-raphy and the novel aim to reveal Beharry’s pri-vate life and emotions and thus to create intim-acy between the hero and his admirers. Along with Cubitt, I would argue that life writing is an

2004 at Al-Amarah, Iraq. Beharry was the first living recipient of the VC in more than thirty years and the only veteran of the war in Iraq . His official citation reads:

Private Beharry carried out two individual acts of great heroism by which he saved the lives of his comrades. Both were in direct face of the enemy, under intense fire, at great personal risk to himself (one leading to him sustaining very serious injuries). Beharry displayed repeated ex-treme gallantry and unquestioned valour, despite intense direct attacks, personal injury and damage to his vehicle in the face of relentless enemy action . (Ministry of Defence, 2005 3369)

In addition to the Victoria Cross, Beharry was also invested with the Kosovo medal and the Iraq medal, which acknowledge his involvement in those two regions, where he did his duty prior to his service in the Iraq War . Furthermore, he was promoted to the rank of lance corporal in recognition of his bravery. Beharry was born in 1979 in Grenada, the for-mer British colony in the Caribbean. Seeing no future prospects in Grenada, he moved to Lon-don at the age of twenty to find a job. In 2001, he joined the first Battalion of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment and trained to become the driver for an armoured fighting vehicle. In his Warrior, he served in peacekeeping missions in Kosovo and Ireland before he was sent to Iraq. As Beharry was unable to return to active milita-ry service after the war due to injuries he recei-ved to his brain and spine, he took on a public relations role with the Household Division and has since performed numerous tasks as a repre-sentative of the British Armed Forces at home. He is especially active in the charity organisation “Help for Heroes”, which raises funds for war ve-terans who have difficulties in adapting to civil life after returning from war .12 Moreover, he actively participates in a positive media representation of the British Armed Forces and their engagements with the help of his heroic reputation . In 2007, he unveiled his own portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London .13 For the opening of the Lord Ashcroft Gallery in 2010, he donated the hel-met he wore during the ambush in Iraq. In 2009, he assisted the Queen in laying a wreath upon the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.14 In 2012, he carried the Olympic Torch through the National Memorial Arboretum on Armed Forces Day.15 On Christmas Day 2014, he volunteered in a soup kitchen and served a Christmas dinner to home-less war veterans (Blunden/Davis 1). The British media regularly report about Beharry’s displays of honourable actions and so remind the public of his heroic reputation .

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He was the first ever Dancing on Ice con-testant to come from outside the world of sport and celebrity and hero Johnson had never set foot on an ice rink or donned a sequinned costume until he signed up to the show. But with typical guts and deter-mination Johnson fast conquered the art of ice skating. (ITV Dancing on Ice 2011)22

His participation in the celebrity show was thus portrayed as another heroic challenge bravely faced. Beharry’s exceptionality and his military skills were also repeatedly emphasised: “While other celebrities run around exuding nervous energy, Lance Corporal Beharry remains cu-cumber-cool. He is showing the same grit he displayed when he twice rescued mates in the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment from ter-rifying ambushes in the Iraq War.” (Ministry of Defence 2011) In the same interview in which he rejected being a celebrity, the presenter em-phasised that he could use his military skills in the show:

It’s some military skills that are import-ant like determination, motivation and being focused on the job at hand that will hopefully get him through to the final stage s . […] [H]e is certainly feeling the support from the military community. (Brit-ish Force s TV 2011)

His professional ice-skating partner Jodeyne Higgins also contributed to Beharry’s hero isation: “Johnson faced a lot of challenges: he was in-jured severely at war […] and to think that he takes on the challenge of ice skating is remark-able. Johnson is an inspirational character.” (ibid.) Such comments indicated how Beharry was “endowed […] not just with a high degree of fame and honour, but with a special allocation of imputed meaning and significance […]” (Cubitt 3) both by the official, military representations and by the celebrity media. His participation in the celebrity show helped to establish him as outstanding and truly heroic even ‘in addition’ to his official status as a Victoria Cross hero. Be-harry’s heroic reputation was thus ‘reinforced’ by his performance as a celebrity contestant.

Conclusion

The analysis of Johnson Beharry’s media rep-resentation shows that the alleged contradiction between hero and celebrity proves to be a fal-lacy. The two concepts are widely believed to contradict each other, but they are compatible in medi a practice . This corresponds with the

important means for heroisation: “The construc-tion of heroic reputations involves the imagina-tive construction of heroic lives – lives, in short, that are not just heroic in isolated detail, but that constitute, in some cases, a heroic totality .” (Cubitt 7) This is the case for Beharry: the pri-vate and intimate details that are revealed do not minimise his true heroism (cf. Parry-Giles 315), but, on the contrary, aim at the creation of a com-plete heroic character . This process of revealing details of Beharry’s private life is taken a step further by representa-tions in other media. Beharry’s numerous rep-resentations in celebrity magazines and celeb rity television shows are at the heart of it . In 2013, the celebrity magazine Hello! exclusively printed Beharry’s wedding pictures16 as well as photos of his new-born son, reporting that Beharry had had mini replicas of the Victoria Cross made to celebrate the occasion of his birth.17 Further-more, Beharry had the motif of the Victoria Cross tattooed on his own back. A black-and-white, full-size photograph of Beharry’s naked back reveal-ing the tattoo can be seen in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery in the Imperial War Museum next to the helmet he donated .18 The peak of Beharry’s role as a celebrity was reached when he participated in the celeb-rity tele vision show Dancing on Ice19 – with full approval of the military. On 18 February 2011, the Ministry of Defence officially announced that Beharry would participate in the upcom-ing season of the show: “From the frontline to receiving a Victoria Cross to now Dancing on Ice with celeb rities. Johnson Beharry is now one of twelve contestants to get through to the first stages of the ITV entertainment show out of an original sixteen.” (British Forces TV)20 Beharry managed to stay in the show until the semi-fina ls. This indicates that he was one of the most popular contes tants because it is the viewers who vote for their favourite celeb rity to win. Beharry seems to have successfully cap-tured the public’s emotional attention. How-ever, it is remark able that his representation in this celebrity programme did not follow the typ-ical conventions of depicting celebrities. Rather than establishing him as a celebrity, the media used heroisation patterns in order to emphasise his heroic reputation and frame him as a hero . People were told, for instance, that Dancing on Ice was extremely challenging for Beharry: “Johnson says he finds the prospect of skating in front of a huge TV audi ence even more frighten-ing than the day he risked death in Iraq to save the lives of fellow soldiers .”21 This was intensified by the fact that Beharry had never done ice skat-ing before in his life.

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1 Even the political controversy over British operations in Afghanistan and Iraq did not cause any controversy over the heroism acknowledged with this decoration. See Smith 205.

2 Kelly shows that, since 9/11, the British military is fre-quently present at popular cultural activities, especially at sports events with a large audience . He concludes that we are currently witnessing a militarisation of British society through an increasingly frequent and positive representation of the British military in popular media. Thus, Beharry’s partici-pation in a TV show has to be considered within this context.

3 According to Kelly (724), the terms “hero” and “soldier” have been used synonymously in British media since 9/11.

4 The interview with Beharry is available on the British Forces Channel on YouTube: 24 May 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMSVl2Zf8o4>.

5 For a more detailed analysis of the topic, see Holmes, Su. “‘Starring… Dyer?’: Re-visiting Star Studies”. Westmin-ster Papers in Communication and Culture 2.2 (2005): 6-21.

6 For a treatise on “soldier heroes” see Dawson.

7 For a picture of Johnson Beharry presenting the Vic toria Cross: 24 May 2015 <http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/mcs/media/ images/81257000/jpg/_81257479_jbpa.jpg>.

8 For this and more detailed information on the medals: 24 May 2015 <http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/184/medals.html>.

9 For more detailed information about the exhibition: 24 May 2015 <http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/184/about.html>.

10 For further information about the purpose of the gal-lery: 24 May 2015 <http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/pack-age/184/about.html>.

11 For more detailed explanations of the individual charac-ter traits, see the film clips: 24 May 2015 <http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/184/index.html>.

12 Beharry is presented as a patron on their website: 24 May 2015 <http://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/how-we-help/about-us/team-h4h/patrons/>.

13 Portrait by Emma Wesley (1979-): 24 May 2015 <http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw 119769/Johnson-Gideon>.

14 For a picture and more details on the occasion: 24 May 2015 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229917/Brown- Cam eron-apologise-Abbey-turning-Poppy-Day-contest-photo-ops.html>.

15 For a picture and more details: 24 May 2015 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166892/Victoria-Cross-winner-carries-Olympic-Torch-National-Memorial-site-mark-Armed-Forces-Day.html>.

16 For the wedding pictures: 24 May 2015 <http://www.hello magazine.com/celebrities/2013032511751/Johnson-Be harry-weds-hello-exclusive/>.

17 For the picture of Beharry in uniform with his new-born son: 24 May 2015 <http://www.hellomagazine.com/health-andbeauty/mother-and-baby/2013091014492/johnson-be-harry-introduces-baby/>.

18 For the picture: 24 May 2015 <http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11720276>.

19 For a picture of Beharry in costume: 24 May 2015 <http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/realitytv/s101/dancing-on-ice/i331519/dancing-on-ice-season-6-johnson-beharry-vc.html#~p-jKl625XbsEQxx>.

various functions which Johnson Beharry fulfils in British society: He performs the official, insti-tutionalised acts that are demanded of a Victoria Cross hero . He also functions as the protagonist of literary representations which add to the con-struction of his heroic reputation . And addition-ally, he participates in celebrity culture. Despite common belief that being a celebrity means a less honourable status than being a hero, Behar-ry’s performance as a celebrity ice-skater and the publication of intimate details of his private life did not diminish his heroic reputation . On the contrary, all of his acts in the celebrity context were framed as heroic deeds, so that his func-tion as a celebrity reinforced his status as a hero. Taking Kelly’s research on the ideological role of the British media representation of the military into account, one could argue that we are cur-rently witnessing a “celebrification” of the British military in order to create public support for the military .23

I would argue furthermore that his role as a celebrity also helped to communicate his heroic reputation to a wider public. It enlarged the out-reach of his heroic story because it reminded the public of Beharry’s heroic reputation in regular intervals . The heroic discourse surrounding his person was (and still is) thus regularly updated and reactivated in society with the help of his celebrity status. His treatment as a celebrity by the media prevents the public from forgetting his heroism. Moreover, the celebrity media provide Beharry’s admirers with a clear reason for their admiration – the bravery for which Beharry re-ceived the Victoria Cross. Beharry is thereby distanced from the irrational worshipping that normally surrounds celebrities and which is ofte n rejected by the public. Paradoxically, this dis-tancing from the negative aspects of a celebrity status is achieved by Beharry’s functioning as a celebrity and the resulting acceptance he finds in celebrity media. The Johnson Beharry case indicates that the relationship between a heroic reputation and that of a celebrity is less abso-lute and more complex than is often assumed . It seems fruitful to focus more on the similarities and connections of the two concepts than on their alleged contradiction .

Kristina Sperlich is a member of the Integrat-ed Research Training Group at the Collaborative Research Center 948 at the University of Frei-burg. She is working on her dissertation on “The Heroic in Contemporary British Fiction for the Young”, supervised by Barbara Korte. She stud-ied English, French and History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Surrey (UK) and the University of Freiburg.

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“Exclusive: Victoria Cross War Hero Johnson Beharry Mar-rie s in Emotional Ceremony .” Hello! Daily News Maga zine 25 March 2013. 24 May 2015 <http://www.hellomagazine.com/celebrities/2013032511751/Johnson-Beharry-weds- hello-exclusive/>.

“Extraordinary Heroes .” The Imperial War Museum . 28 July 2015 <http://archive.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/184/index. html>.

Giannangeli, Marco. “Johnson Beharry: I’ll Win Dancing On Ice for My Gran .” Express 9 January 2011 . 24 May 2015 <http://www.express.co.uk/news/showbiz/222001/John-son-Beharry-I-ll-win-dancing-on-ice-for-my-gran>.

“Johnson Beharry through to the First Stages of Danc-ing on Ice 21 .01 .11 .” British Forces TV on YouTube. 21 January 2011. 24 May 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMSVl2Zf8o4>.

Kelly, John. “Popular Culture, Sport and the ‘Hero’-fication of British militarism.” Sociology 47.4 (2013): 722-738.

Ministry of Defence. “The London Gazette of Thursday 17 March 2005 . Honours and Awards .” The Gazette. Official Public Record Number 57587. 3369-70. 28 July 2015 <https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/57587/sup-plement/3369>.

Ministry of Defence. “Announcement. VC Hero Cruising on Ice.” 18 February 2011. 24 May 2015 < https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vc-hero-cruising-on-ice>.

Parry-Giles, Trevor. “‘Harry Potter’ and the Paradoxical Cri-tique of Celebrity Culture.” Celebrity Studies 2 .3 (2011): 305-319.

Smith, Melvin Charles. Awarded For Valour: A History of the Victoria Cross and the Evolution of British Heroism. Hound-mills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

“War Hero Johnson Beharry Introduces his Baby Son.” Hello! Daily News Magazine 10 September 2013. 24 May 2015 <http://www.hellomagazine.com/healthandbeauty/mother- and-baby/2013091014492/johnson-beharry-introduces- baby/>.

20 For the whole report, see British Forces News Chan-nel on YouTube: 24 May 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMSVl2Zf8o4>.

21 For further information on Beharry’s motivation for the contest and a picture of Beharry and his grandmother: 24 May 2015 <http://www.express.co.uk/news/showbiz/222001/Johnson-Beharry-I-ll-win-dancing-on-ice-for-my-gran>.

22 For a short clip of Beharry’s performance on ice: 24 May 2015 <http://www.dancingonicetour.co.uk/johnson.html>.

23 Kelly furthermore claims that sport events are especially apt for a heroic representation of the military because the audience functions as “imagined community of nation” (727) .

Works Cited

Beharry, Johnson, and Nick Cook. Barefoot Soldier: The Amazing True Story of Courage Under Fire. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2007.

Beharry, Johnson, and Jim Eldridge. Hero: The Incredible True Story of Courage Under Fire. London: Scholastic Chil-dren’s Books, 2014.

Blunden, Mark, and Anna Davis. “VC Stands For Veterans Campaign. Hero Beharry Backs the Standard Appeal To Help Homeless Ex-Servicemen.” London Evening Stand-ard 9 December 2014: 1.

“Call for Papers: The Making of Reputations: Honour – Glory – Celebrity.” Graduiertenschule Humanities der Universität Freiburg. 2015. 23 April 2015 <https://www.humanities.uni-freiburg.de/Daten/Dokumente/cfp_qmul2015/view?-searchterm=Queen%20Mary>.

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Kristina Sperlich

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Impressumhelden. heroes. héros. E-Journal on Cultures of the Heroic, Collaborative Research Center 948 “Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms” Ulrich Bröckling, Barbara Korte, Birgit Studt Volume 2 (2016), Special Issue, The Making of Reputations: Honour – Glory – Celebrity

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