Monday 29th of April 2024
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sarko-jeanne of arc...

sarkojeanne

President Sarkozy first attempted to wrestle Joan from far-right ownership during his bid for election in 2007. So did his principal rival, Ségolène Royal.  Although the president is not yet a declared candidate, his appearances tomorrow will, in effect, mark his entry to this spring’s presidential campaign.

Implicitly or explicitly, Mr Sarkozy will, like Joan, pose as the saviour of a French way of life menaced by arrogant external forces and internal divisions and weaknesses. He will imply that he, not the National Front, is the true guarantor of French nationhood.

There is nothing new in posthumous attempts to recruit Joan of Arc to political or religious causes. She was virtually forgotten by the French for 400 years, until her re-invention first as a patriotic-republican and then as a religious-conservative heroine in the mid 19th century. In the US and Canada, she has become a feminist icon: a symbol of girl power. In Latin America, she is claimed by the revolutionary Left as one of the first popular, resistance leaders, a female Che in chain mail. In 1920 Joan was canonised by Rome as part of a campaign by the French church to recapture the soul of France from godless republicanism.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-600year-struggle-for-the-soul-of-joan-of-arc-6284992.html

not la merkel antoinette...

A film set around the French Revolution, in which German-born Diane Kruger plays Marie Antoinette, will launch the Berlin Film Festival.

Directed by Benoit Jacquot, Farewell My Queen looks at the early days of the Revolution from the point of view of servants working at Versailles.

France's Lea Seydoux plays one of the ill-fated queen's ladies-in-waiting.

British director Mike Leigh will chair the jury at this year's festival, which runs from 9 to 19 February.

Earlier this week, organisers said Meryl Streep would receive an honorary award during this year's event.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16422935

the virgin warrior....

By the time Joan of Arc was 16 and had proclaimed herself the virgin warrior sent by God to deliver France from her enemies, the English, she had been receiving the counsel of angels for three years. Until then, the voices she said she heard, speaking from over her right shoulder and accompanied by a great light, had been hers alone, a rapturous secret.

But in 1428, when the voices pressed her to undertake the quest for which they had been preparing her, they transformed a seemingly undistinguished peasant into a visionary heroine who defied every limitation placed on a woman of the late Middle Ages. The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years’ War and of history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/joan-of-arc-enduring-power.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print