The Cape Breton Coal Strike of 1981

The Cape Breton coal strike of 1981 was a strike by coal miners belonging to the United Mine Workers of America against the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. The strike, which was bitter and violent, began in the middle of July 1981, and ended in early October of that year.

Historical Context

Coal miners in Nova Scotia were first organized by the Provincial Workmen’s Association (PWA) in 1897. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) attempted to organize the miners and supplant the PWA in 1908. The two unions fought for control, but in 1917 joined forces and formed the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia. The Amalgamated affiliated fully with UMWA a year later. Miners were represented continuously by UMWA over the next 80 years.

Strikes during this period were exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, major work stoppages occurred in 1920s. In 1920, the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO) took ownership of all gold, silver and coal mines in Nova Scotia. UMWA and BESCO had an extremely adversarial relationship. After BESCO slashed wages by a third in 1922, 12,000 outraged union members struck. Twelve hundred cavalry troops were sent to Cape Breton to keep order, and machine gun nests were set up to protection BESCO property. After eight months, BESCO agreed to cut wages by only 18 percent—an agreement neither side was very happy with.

During a steelworkers’ strike in the summer of 1923, mounted provincial police attacked a crowd of women and children on July 1, 1923 in what became known as Bloody Sunday. The miners’ union struck in protest. Federal troops were called in to break both strikes. Six months later, when the miners’ contract expired, BESCO proposed wage cuts totaling 20 percent. The union struck again, and a new contract restoring the wage cut was reached in April 1924.

Battle of Waterford Lake

Then on March 6, 1925, UMWA struck again, this time to win a wage increase to restore income to its 1922 levels. Twelve thousand miners walked out. BESCO police began terrorizing citizens in mining towns throughout the province, charging even small groups of people on horseback and beating anyone they caught. BESCO, which owned most of the electrical utilities and grocery stores in the mining towns, cut off credit. By June, thousands of families were on the verge of starvation. On June 11, approximately 3,000 men and boys gathered in the town of New Waterford and marched on the city’s BESCO-owned power plant, determined to restore water and power service to their homes. The strikers and their supporters were confronted by 100 mounted, armed police. In what became known as the “Battle of Waterford Lake”, the crowd attacked. Several policemen fired into the crowd, hitting three. Gilbert Watson and Michael O’Handley were wounded, but William Davis died from a bullet in the heart. Several days of rioting followed, and more than 2,000 Canadian Army soldiers were sent to the province on July 16, 1925, to restore order. It was the second-largest domestic use of military force in Canadian history (only the use of the Army during the North-West Rebellion in 1885 was larger). In the 1925 provincial election, Edgar Nelson Rhodes, a Conservative, was elected Premier of Nova Scotia. Rhodes quickly negotiated a temporary settlement of the strike under which a Royal Commission would investigate the dispute. A tentative settlement on the union’s terms was reached in August. Despite a brief resumption of strike activity on August 5, the strike ended on August 9, 1925.

The strike broke BESCO. The company was reorganized, and emerged in 1927 as the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation. Technological innovation, the difficulty of mining coal (coal in Nova Scotia was increasingly mined from veins under the sea floor), and the availability of natural gas (piped in from oil fields in the West) led to rapid decreases in the amount of coal mined as well as the number of miners. The economic viability of the Nova Scotia mines declined significantly. In 1967, the Parliament of Canada nationalized the Cape Breton mines. The Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO), a public company owned by the Government of Canada, took ownership of the mines.

Strike

On July 17, 1981, 3,500 miners in the Cape Breton coal fields went on strike against DEVCO. The miners sought a 60 percent wage increase over two years. It was the first strike since nationalization of the mines in 1967. But after a three-month-long strike in the United States in the spring of 1981, UMWA had little money left in the international union’s strike fund. The Nova Scotia miners were deeply angered that UMWA was unable to support their strike. To suppor the strike effort, the local union organized a United Mine Workers Wives Association to raise funds and provide food, financial support, and other charity for strikers’ families.

The 13-week strike was a bitter one. When the Cabinet of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau met in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in early September 1981, striking miners forced their way onto the airport tarmac and cornered Finance Minister Allan MacEachen and External Affairs Minister Mark MacGuigan to demand an end to the strike. Three federal mediators attempted to negotiate an end to the strike, and three times the miners rejected tentative contracts (the last one proposing a 50 percent wage hike over three years).

Vandalism against company property began in August, and quickly escalated. In mid-September, a bomb was detonated at a DEVCO mine, and DEVCO coal rail cars derailed at the company’s Lingan mine in New Waterford.

A fourth federal mediator arrived just days after the bombings. The strike finally ended on October 3, 1981, with a tentative agreement which raised wages 50 percent over two years. The pact was ratified by the union a few days later.

Aftermath

Seething over the international union’s inability to fund the strike, dissident miners attempted to organize their own union with the help and support of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU). The attempt to decertify the United Mine Workers and replace it with a new union was part of a larger movement among Canadian labour unions to split away from their parent “international” unions in the U.S. Widespread discontent existed over the amount of dues sent to international union headquarters in America (many Canadian unions called them “profits”) and the relatively minor attention given to the problems of Canadian workers in return.

The CCU founded the Canadian Mineworkers Union, and began an organizing campaign in late 1981. In a federally-supervised union election in March 1983, the miners voted 1,750 to 1,393 against affiliating with the CMU. CMU forced a second election in March 1984, but the miners rejected disaffiliation a second time by a vote of 1,795 to 1,242. CMU’s support declined quickly thereafter, as miners became disenchanted with the constant campaigning for votes. UMWA was never challenged again, and continued to represent miners on Cape Breton Island for the next 17 years.

The economic viability of the Cape Breton coal mines continued to decline, however. DEVCO closed all mines in 2001, and the local UMWA union disbanded.

Burying the Hatchet Ceremony

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The Burying the Hatchet Ceremony happened in Nova Scotia on June 25, 1761 and successfully ended a period of protracted warfare, which had lasted over seventy-five years and encompassed six wars, between the Mi’kmaq people and the British. The Burying the hatchet Ceremony was the culmination of a negotiated treaty that created an enduring peace and a commitment to obey the rule of law.

Despite the intentions of the British dignitaries who attended the ceremony and helped draft the treaty, many of the Treaty commitments were ignored by local settlers who migrated onto Mi’kmaq and Maliseet territories. Twenty-five years after the ceremony, some warfare returned as Maliseet and Mikmaq communities joined Americans against the British in the American Revolution.

Nova Scotians celebrate the Treaties of 1760-61 every year on Treaty Day (October 1).

The northeastern region of North American, encompassing New England and Acadia/Mi’kma’ki, increasingly became an area of conflict between the expanding French and British Empires. Expansion by both Empires, over a seventy-five-year period, through six wars brought the Mi’kmaq and Acadians into conflict with British New Englanders.

Frontier warfare against families was the Wabanaki Confederacy and New England approach to warfare since King William’s War began in 1688. Over this seventy-five years, there was a long history of the Wabanaki Confederacy (which included the Mi’kmaq) killing British civilians along the New England/ Acadia border in Maine.

In an effort to prevent these French and Wabanaki massacres of British subjects, many Massachusetts Governors, issued a bounty for the scalps of men, women, and children of the Wabanaki Confederacy. During Father Le Loutre’s War, Edward Cornwallis followed New England’s example when, after the Raid on Dartmouth (1749), he attempted to protect the first British settlers in Nova Scotia from being scalped by putting a bounty on the Mi’kmaq (1749).

During the final period of this conflict, the French and Indian War, French Officers, Mi’kmaq and Acadians carried out military strikes against the British, particularly after the deportation of the Acadians and the bounty proclamation of 1756. The Mi’kmaq and their French allies conducted the Northeastern Coast Campaign (1755) in Maine and extended this campaign into Nova Scotia, attacking civilians during the raids on Lunenburg. Following the British capture of Louisbourg in 1758, Quebec in 1759, and Montreal in 1760, French imperial power was destroyed in North America. With the loss of their French ally the Mi’kmaq recognized the need for a new relationship with the British.

There were various treaties signed with other tribes of the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet before the formal burying the hatchet ceremony. On 11 feb 1760, two tribes of the Passamaquoddy and St. John River came to Halifax with Colonel Arbuthnot and appeared before council, renewing the treaty of 1725, giving hostages or their good behavior. Truck houses for trade were established at Fort Frederick. Two days later, on Feb 13, a treaty was ratified with Roger Morris and one of the Mi’kmaq chiefs. The following month, 10 March 1760. Three Mi’kmaq chiefs Paul Laret, (LaHave); Michael Austine (Richibucto); Calude Renie (Cheboudie and Musquodoboit) made a treaty. The treaties continued even after the formal ceremony: on 15 October 1761, Jannesvil Peitougashwas (Pictock and Malogomish) made a treaty.

Former ally of Father Le Loutre, French priest Pierre Maillard accepted an invitation from Nova Scotia Governor Charles Lawrence to travel to Halifax and assist in negotiating with the Mi’kmaq peoples. He became a British official (“Government Agent to the Indians”, with an annual salary of £150). He asked for (and received) permission to maintain an oratory at a Halifax battery, where he held Catholic services for Acadians and Mi’kmaqs in the area. In his official capacity Maillard was able to obtain agreement from most of the tribal chiefs to sign peace treaties with the British in Halifax.

The Ceremony

On June 25, 1761, a “Burying of the Hatchet Ceremony” was held at Governor Jonathan Belcher’s garden on present-day Spring Garden, Halifax in front of the Court House.

Representing the colony were Belcher and four members of the Nova Scotia Council: Richard Bulkley, John Collier, Joseph Gerrish, and Alexander Grant. Also present were Admiral Lord Colville, commander-in-chief of British naval forces in North America, Major-General John Henry Bastide, the chief engineer in Nova Scotia and Colonel William Forster, the commander of Nova Scotia’s army regiments. These three men were accompanied by a detachment of soldiers.

There were at least four Mi’kmaq chiefs that signed the treaty: Jeannot Peguidalonet (representing Cape Breton), Claude Atouach (Shediac), Joseph Sabecholouet (Miramichi), and Aikon Ashabuc (Pokemouche). Representatives from other villages were also present at the treaty signing.

The occasion was one of “great pomp and ceremony”. The two parties faced each other near a British flag. French priest Pierre Maillard was in the middle acting as the interpreter. Belcher promised the crown would protect the Mi’kmaq from unscrupulous traders, protect their religion and not interfere with Catholic missionaries living among them. Belcher gave presents to each chief along with medals that were passed down through generations as testimony to the words that bound their people to uphold the peace. Both Belcher and the chiefs then moved to the flag post, where Belcher and the chiefs formally buried the hatchet.

One of the Mi’kmaq Chiefs declared that “he now buried the hatchet on behalf of himself and his whole tribe, a token of their submission and of their having made peace.” The Chief of the Cape Breton Mi’kmaq’s declared: “As long as the Sun and the Moon shall endure, as long as the Earth on which I dwell shall exist in the same State as you this day, with the Laws of your Government, faithful and obedient to the Crown”.

At the same time the hatchet was being buried, the Chiefs went through the ceremony of washing the paint from their bodies in token of hostilities being ended. The whole ceremony was concluded by all present drinking to the king’s health. The stone Halifax Provincial Court (Spring Garden Road) now stands beside the spot of the burial, a symbol of peace and the rule of law.

Aftermath

The British were relieved that a peace was reached. The vicar at St. Paul’s Church, Thomas Wood, praised Father Maillard for his efforts in negotiating it when he wrote, “Thanks to [Maillard] many Englishmen were saved from being massacred.” The Mi’kmaq retained a strong sense of themselves as a separate people. They still had their own language, a distinct material culture, trial institutions, and a spiritual life informed by Mi’kmaq tradition and an ongoing attachment to the Catholic Church, despite British attempts to converted them to Protestantism in the 1750s. The disrespect they often received from British colonists only served to emphasize their status as a separate nation.

According to historian John G. Reid, the treaties of 1760-61, while they contain statement of Mi’kmaw submission to the British crown, what is known of the surrounding discussions, combined with the strong evidence of later Mi’kmaw statements, indicates that a friendly and reciprocal relationship was the real intent. The Mi’kmaw leaders who came initially to Halifax in 1760 had clear goals that centred on the making of peace, the establishment of a secure and well-regulated trade in commodities such as furs, and an ongoing friendship with the British crown. In return, they offered their own friendship and a tolerance of limited British settlement, although without any formal land surrender. To fulfill the friendly and reciprocal intent of the treaties, further British settlement of land would need to be negogiated and, in exchange for sharing the land, presents would be given to the Mi’kmaq. The documents summarizing the peace agreements failed to establish specific territorial limits on the expansion of British settlements, but they assured the Mi’kmaq access to the natural resources that had long sustained them along the regions’ coasts and in the woods.

As the New England Planters and United Empire Loyalists began to arrive in the Mi’kmaki in greater numbers, economic, environmental and cultural pressures were put in the Mi’kmaq with the erosion of the intent of the treaties. The Mi’kmaq tried to enforce the treaties through threat of force. At the beginning of the American Revolution, many Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes were supportive of the Americans against the British. They participated in the Maugerville Rebellion and the Battle of Fort Cumberland in 1776. (Mí’kmaq delegates concluded the first international treaty, the Treaty of Watertown, with the United States soon after it declared its independence in July 1776. These delegates did not officially represent the Mi’kmaq government, although many individual Mi’kmaq did privately join the Continental army as a result.) During the St. John River expedition, Col. Allan’s untiring effort to gain the friendship and support of the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq for the Revolution was somewhat successful. There was a significant exodus of Maliseet from the St John River to join the American forces at Machias, Maine. On Sunday, July 13, 1777, a party of between 400 and 500 men, women, and children, embarked in 128 canoes from the Old Fort Meduetic (8 miles below Woodstock) for Machias. The party arrived at a very opportune moment for the Americans, and afforded material assistance in the defence of that post during the attack made by Sir George Collier on the 13th to 15 August. The British did only minimal damage to the place, and the services of the Indians on the occasion earned for them the thanks of the council of Massachusetts. In June 1779, Mi’kmaq in the Miramichi attacked and plundered some of the British in the area. The following month, British Captain Augustus Harvey, in command of the HMS Viper, arrived in the area and battled with the Mi’kmaq. One Mi’kmaq was killed and 16 were taken prisoner to Quebec. The prisoners were eventually brought to Halifax, where they were later released upon signing the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown on 28 July 1779.

As their military power wained in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Mi’kmaq people made explicit appeals to the British of the reciprocal intent of the treaties and the duty of the British to give “presents” to the Mi’kmaq for occupying Mi’kma’ki. In response, the British offered charity or, the word most often used by government officials, “relief”. And relief always came with strings attached. The Mi’kmaq must give up their way of life and begin to settle on farms. Their children were to be sent for a proper education to British schools.

Beaubears Island

Beaubears Island is an island at the confluence of the Northwest Miramichi and Southwest Miramichi Rivers near Miramichi, New Brunswick. The island is most famous for being the site of an Acadian refugee camp during the French and Indian War. The camp was under the command of leader of the Acadian resistance to the expulsion, Charles Deschamps de Boishébert et de Raffetot. The island is named after Pierre Beaubair, superintendent of the colony.

The island is home to two National Historic Sites of Canada:

Beaubears Island Shipbuilding National Historic Site of Canada, and

Boishébert National Historic Site of Canada.

The shipbuilding site occupies the eastern end of the island; the Boishébert site comprises the rest of the island, and adjacent Wilson’s Point. Both sites are administered by Parks Canada in collaboration with the Friends of Beaubears Island. The sites retain 200-year-old Eastern White Pines; thus the parks are significant from the perspectives of both human and natural history.

History

Prior to Acadian settlement in the region, the Mi’kmaq people camped on the island.

Boishébert and the Acadians

During the French and Indian War, Charles Deschamps de Boishébert et de Raffetot led the Acadian and Mi`kmaq resistance to the Expulsion of the Acadians. Toward this end, to help Acadians evade capture, Boishébert set up an Acadian refugee camp on the Island. The Camp was named Camp de l’ Esperance. The camp lasted between 1756 – 1759.

After Louisbourg fell on 26 July 1758, French officer Boishébert withdrew, with the British in pursuit. Boishebert brought back a large number of Acadians from the region around Port-Toulouse (St. Peter’s, Nova Scotia) to the security of his post at Beaubears Island on the Miramichi River.

During the Ile Saint-Jean Campaign and the St. John River Campaign the number of Acadian refugees increased dramatically. The camp had eventually 900 French refugees. Over 200 of the refugees died at the camp. During the war, the camp was protected by a battery of 16 French cannons at French Fort Cove.

During the Gulf of St. Lawrence Campaign, on September 15, 1758, Brigadier James Murray was at Miramichi and discovered that there were many Acadian refugees at a settlement about ten leagues up the Miramichi River which had fled during the Ile Saint-Jean Campaign. According to Murray, all of the Acadians were starving. They had sent most of their effects on to Canada and expected so to go there themselves.

The first shipyard was established by James Fraser and James Thom (1790). For the first half of the eighteenth century, the Fraser shipyard was considered the most important commercial establishment in New Brunswick. The 1850s were regarded as the golden age of Miramichi shipbuilding with yards in operation from Beaubears Island. Harley continued to build ships and in 1866 launched what is believed to be the last vessel constructed at Beaubears, the barque La Plata.

By the end of the 19th century, the island appears to have been deserted. It was acquired by the O’Brien family in 1920 and willed to the government of Canada in 1973 following the death of Joseph Leonard O’Brien, a former lieutenant governor of New Brunswick.

Beaubears Island Shipbuilding National Historic Site of Canada, also known as J. Leonard O’Brien Memorial, is the only known, undisturbed archaeological site associated with the national significance of the 19th century wooden shipbuilding industry in New Brunswick. In accordance with O’Brien’s wishes, the island was willed to Parks Canada and remains an integral part of Canadian history as a whole.

Jurriaen Aernoutsz

Jurriaen Aernoutsz (or Aernouts) was a Dutch colonial navy captain, who briefly conquered the capital of Acadia, Fort Pentagouet in Penobscot Bay (present day Castine, Maine) and several other villages, and renamed the colony New Holland during the Franco-Dutch War.

The commander of the frigate Flying Horse, based at Curaçao during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Aernoutsz was dispatched by the governor of Curaçao to fight French and English ships in the North Atlantic after the Netherlands recaptured New York City. By the time he reached New York, however, the English and the Dutch had made peace in the Treaty of Westminster — but with the Franco-Dutch War still underway, Aernoutsz met with John Rhoades and decided to attack Acadia.

On August 10, 1674, Aernoutsz and the crew of the Flying Horse captured Fort Pentagouet in two hours. He then sailed up the Bay of Fundy, pillaging several French posts along the coast and ending at Fort Jemseg, which he also captured. Aernoutsz claimed Acadia as the Dutch territory of New Holland, burying bottles at both Pentagouet and Jemseg to assert his claim, and remained in Acadia for about a month. He subsequently returned to Boston in mid-September, disposing of his pillage and selling the cannon from Pentagouet to the government of Massachusetts.

Aernoutsz then returned to Curaçao in October, leaving Rhoades and company in Boston with orders to return to Acadia to maintain possession of the territory. Once in Acadia, Rhoades began seizing New England vessels coming to trade with the Wabanaki Confederacy. As a result, the government of Massachusetts apprehended the party and tried them as pirates, during which time the French regained control of the territory without any military opposition.

The Dutch continued to consider New Holland part of their colonial empire in North America, appointing Cornelius Van Steenwyk as Dutch governor of the territory in 1676, but this was largely a paper designation — in actual practice, the region remained under French control and sovereignty. Shortly after his appointment, Van Steenwyk sent a Dutch expedition to reoccupy Pentagouet, but they were turned back by three British warships from Boston. The Dutch continued to claim sovereignty over Acadia on paper until 1678, when they surrendered the claim at the end of the war.

 

Noel Doiron

Noel Doiron (1684 – December 13, 1758) was a leader of the Acadians, renown for the decisions he made during the Deportation of the Acadians. Doiron was deported on a vessel named the Duke William (1758). The sinking of the Duke William was one of the worst marine disasters in Canadian history. The captain of the Duke William, William Nichols, described Noel Doiron as the “head prisoner” on board the ship and as the “father” to all the Acadians on Ile St. Jean (present-day Prince Edward Island).

Second only to Evangeline, the most well known Acadian story of the Victorian era was that of Noel Doiron (1684-1758). For his “noble resignation” and self-sacrifice aboard the Duke William, Doiron was celebrated in popular print throughout the 19th century in England and America. Doiron also is the namesake of the village Noel, Nova Scotia and the surrounding communities of Noel Shore, East Noel (also known as Densmore Mills), Noel Road and North Noel Road.

Queen Anne’s War

Noel Doiron was born at Port Royal, Acadia but he lived most of his childhood at Pisiquid in the Parish of St. Famille (present day Falmouth, Nova Scotia.

During Queen Anne’s War, Noel Doiron was taken as a prisoner of war to Boston by Colonel Benjamin Church. In February 1704, New France orchestrated a raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts. During the raid, New England prisoners were taken back to Quebec. One of the prisoners taken was John Williams. Five months later Church was sent to Acadia to retaliate for the raid and to capture prisoners to ransom the release of those taken in Quebec. In June 1704, Church came from Boston with 17 vessels and 550 men. He torched Acadian hamlets in an expedition that raided Grand Pré, Pisiguit, and Beaubassin. When Church returned to New England, he boasted that only five dwellings remained in all Acadia. He also took 45 prisoners, two of which were Noel Doiron, age 20, and his future wife Marie Henry.

While forcibly removed from their homes, Doiron, Marie and the other Acadian hostages were initially permitted to roam freely in the streets of Boston, much to the dismay of New Englanders. On November 14, 1704 the Massachusetts House of Representatives expressed the opinion that the Acadians in the town were “under little or no restraint, which this House apprehend not safe.” The House demanded the hostages be imprisoned at Castle Island, just off the shore of Boston, and Fort Hill. Apparently, the prisoners were not immediately arrested because on November 24, 1704, the Boston selectmen requested of the Governor of Massachusetts “to restrain the French Prisoners from going about the town at their own pleasure, least their so doing may prove hazardous to this town.”

The first group of Acadian prisoners were returned to Acadia in 1705. Noel and Marie Doiron were delayed in returning because the New Englanders refused to release the notorious privateer Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste until John Williams was released. After two years in exile, Noel Doiron and the other Acadian prisoners finally returned to Acadia along with Pierre Masonnait. They arrived at Port Royal on September 18, 1706. Within three days of their arrival, Noel and Marie had their first child, who was born while imprisoned in Boston, and baptized at Port Royal. A marriage ceremony quickly followed.

Life in Vila Noel, Acadia

By 1714, Doiron and his family were established in Noel, Nova Scotia. The Doiron family grew to include five sons and three daughters—one son died in Vila Noel before 1746. The three daughters would marry and leave the village while the surviving sons married and remained with their parents. Doiron lived in the village for 40 years. During that time he and his family built dykes that still exist in the community as well as a chapel at Burntcoat Head, Nova Scotia (formerly known as Steeple Point). As with most Acadians in the Cobequid region, Noel was likely a cattle farmer involved in supporting trade with the French Fortress of Louisbourg.

King George’s War

During King George’s War, Doiron was involved in the aftermath of the Battle of Grand Pré. Upon wounded French soldiers returning to Chignecto, they stopped at the village of Noel. There they were met by Doiron’s priest and taken care of until they continued their journey.

Father Le Loutre’s War

Early in Father Le Loutre’s War, the British established Halifax and built fortifications in all the major Acadian Communities. Shortly after, Noel’s priest was arrested by the British and marched to Halifax. In response to the war and the British taking firm control over Acadia, the inhabitants of the parish sent a request for assistance to Acadians residing in Beaubassin. The message stated that British soldiers,

… came furtively during the night to take our pastor and our four deputies … [A British officer] read the orders by which he was authorized to seize all the muskets in our houses, thereby reducing us to the condition of the Irish … Thus we see ourselves on the brink of destruction, liable to be captured and transported to the English islands and to lose our religion.

Early in 1750, Noel Doiron and his family joined the Acadian Exodus and left mainland Nova Scotia for Pointe Prime, Ile St. Jean (present day Eldon, Prince Edward Island).

Life on Ile St. Jean

Noel and Marie Doiron spent eight years at Pointe Prime, Ile St. Jean. Life there was difficult. The summer before the Noel Bay settlers arrived, a field mouse infestation had destroyed the crops on the island. The next summer a plague of locusts appeared and the following summer brought with it a blistering drought. The census of 1752 reported: “the greater number amongst them had not even bread to eat … [many] subsisted on the shell fish they gathered on the shores of the harbour when the tide was out.” Food shortages were exacerbated when the French government ordered Acadians to cease fishing and focus exclusively on crop production—crops were required for troops at Louisbourg. Faced with severe food shortages, the officials of Ile St. Jean pleaded for assistance from Louisburg, Quebec and France.

In 1752, the former residents of the Noel Bay settlement were joined at Pointe Prime by their former priest, Jacques Girard. Two years earlier, in March 1750, when Governor Edward Cornwallis arrested Girard, he confined him to the Governor’s home in Halifax. Girard was charged with providing aid to representatives of the French Crown. After giving an oath to Cornwallis that he would never return to the Cobequid, Girard was re-assigned to the Piziquid (present day Windsor, Nova Scotia). He resumed his priestly duties until he was “rescued” by forces loyal to the French Crown and transported to Point Prime on Ile St. Jean. In a letter dated August 24, 1753, Girard wrote on the plight of the Pointe Prime Acadians:

Our refugees … this winter will not be in any condition to work, they lack tools, they cannot find shelter from the rigor of the cold by day or night. Most of the children are so naked that they cannot hide it. And when I come into the houses, they are all in the ashes near the fire, they hide and take flight without shoes, without stockings, without shirts and all are not reduced to such extremity but almost all of them are miserable.

On October 27, 1753, Girard wrote that the situation remained unchanged. Despite these deprivations, the inhabitants of Pointe Prime were able to construct a parish church and a parochial home at their own expense.

French and Indian War

During the French and Indian War, the British began the Expulsion of the Acadians from mainland Nova Scotia in 1755. Many Acadians fled to Ile Saint Jean, putting further stress on scarse resources. A year later, in 1756, the continued famine on Ile St. Jean prompted authorities to relocate families to Quebec. This year of severe famine also marked the death of a Pointe Prime resident: one of Doiron’s daughters-in-law.

In 1758, after the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), the British began the Ile Saint-Jean Campaign to expel the Acadians, including Noel Doiron and his family, from Ile Saint Jean. The British authorities had given up on their earlier attempts to assimilate the Acadians into the American colonies and now wanted them returned directly to France. Approximately 4,600 Acadians lived on Ile St. Jean: a third were deported to France, a third eluded their British captors, and a third died en route to France.

On October 20, 1758, Noel Doiron and most of the other inhabitants from the Noel Bay embarked for passage from Ile St. Jean to France on the Duke William. Captain William Nichols’ account of the voyage across the Atlantic notes that the Duke William sprang a leak on the fifth day after leaving for France. The leak was sealed after nine days; however, on December 11 a more serious leak was discovered that threatened to compromise the completion of the voyage. The next day, those aboard the Duke William witnessed the sinking of the transport vessel Violet and the loss of 300 other Acadians who were on board.

On December 13, two vessels approached the Duke William. Believing help had arrived, all assumed their ordeal had concluded. It was stated in one report, that upon seeing the approaching vessels, Noel Doiron gripped the Captain “in his aged arms and cried for joy.” The two vessels, however, refused to provide assistance and continued on their way. According to Nichols, Doiron again embraced the captain and requested that he, the captain, “… and his people [the crew] … endeavor to save their own lives in their boats, and leave them [the Acadians] to their fate, as it was impossible the boats could carry all.” Two lifeboats were on board and these were lowered into the North Atlantic carrying only the captain, his crew, and the parish priest.

Captain Nichols later recorded that during the departure Doiron reprimanded a fellow Acadian for trying to board a lifeboat while abandoning his wife and children. Captain Nichols records Doiron’s final encounter with his priest Girard: “the priest went and gave his people his benediction: then, after saluting the old gentleman [Noel Doiron], he tucked up his canonical robes, and went in the boat.” The captain reported that Doiron and the other Acadians “in their last moments … behaved with the greatest fortitude.” The Captain recorded that he and Doiron took “… leave of each other with tears in their eyes, and the captain requested that his people keep the boats near the ship, which he was determined not to quit himself until it was dark.”

Doiron’s priest Girard wrote that he “laid off the ship about half an hour, when their cries, and waving us to be gone, almost broke our hearts.” The Duke William drifted, according to Girard, “till it fell calm, and as [it] went down her decks blew up. The noise was like the explosion of a gun, or a loud clap of thunder.” The Duke William sank about 20 leagues from the coast of France in the English Channel shortly after 4:00 p.m. on December 13, 1758. Noel Doiron died on board along with his wife, Marie, five of their children with their spouses and over thirty grandchildren.

Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Comte d’Artagnan

Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Comte d’Artagnan  (c. 1611 – 25 June 1673) served Louis XIV as captain of the Musketeers of the Guard and died at the Siege of Maastricht in the Franco-Dutch War. A fictionalized account of his life by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras formed the basis for the d’Artagnan Romances of Alexandre Dumas, most famously including The Three Musketeers. The heavily fictionalized version of d’Artagnan featured in Dumas’ works and their subsequent screen adaptations is now far more widely known than the real historical figure.

D’Artagnan was born near Lupiac in south-western France. His father, Bertrand de Batz (de Baatz), was the son of a newly ennobled merchant, Arnaud de Batz, who purchased the castle of Castelmore. Charles de Batz went to Paris in the 1630s, using the name of his mother, daughter of an illustrious family, Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan. D’Artagnan found a way to enter into the Musketeers in 1632, perhaps thanks to the influence of his family’s friend, Monsieur de Tréville (Jean-Armand du Peyrer, Comte de Troisville). While in the Musketeers, d’Artagnan sought the protection of the influential Cardinal Mazarin, France’s principal minister since 1643. In 1646, the Musketeers company was dissolved, but d’Artagnan continued to serve his protector Mazarin.

Career

D’Artagnan had a career in espionage for Cardinal Mazarin, in the years after the first Fronde. Due to d’Artagnan’s faithful service during this period, Louis XIV entrusted him with many secret and delicate situations that required complete discretion. He followed Mazarin during his exile in 1651 in the face of the hostility of the aristocracy. In 1652 d’Artagnan was promoted to lieutenant in the Gardes Françaises, then to captain in 1655. In 1658, he became a second lieutenant in the newly reformed Musketeers. This was a promotion, as the Musketeers were far more prestigious than the Gardes-Françaises.

D’Artagnan was famous for his connection with the arrest of Nicolas Fouquet. Fouquet was Louis XIV’s finance commissioner and aspired to take the place of Mazarin as the King’s advisor. Fouquet was also a lover of grand architecture and employed the greatest architects and artisans in the building of his Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte. He celebrated the completion with a most extravagant feast, at which every guest was given a horse. The king however felt upstaged by the grandeur of the home and event and, suspecting that such magnificence could only be explained through Fouquet’s pilfering the royal treasury, three weeks later had d’Artagnan arrest Fouquet. To prevent his escape by bribery, d’Artagnan was assigned to guard him for four years until Fouquet was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In 1667, d’Artagnan was promoted to captain-lieutenant of the Musketeers, the effective commander as the nominal captain was the King. As befitted his rank and position, he could be identified by his striking burgundy, white and black livery—the colours of the commanding officer of the Musketeers. Another of d’Artagnan’s assignments was the governorship of Lille, which was won in battle by France in 1667. D’Artagnan was an unpopular governor and longed to return to battle. He found his chance when Louis XIV went to war with the Dutch Republic in the Franco-Dutch War. After being recalled to service, d’Artagnan was subsequently killed in battle on June 25, 1673, when a musket ball tore into his throat at the Siege of Maastricht. The French historian Odile Bordaz believes that he was buried in Saint Peter and Paul Church in Wolder, the Netherlands.

Portrayals in fiction

The real d’Artagnan’s life was used as the basis for Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras’ novel Les mémoires de M. d’Artagnan. Alexandre Dumas in turn used de Sandras’ novel as the main source for his d’Artagnan Romances (The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After and The Vicomte de Bragelonne), which cover d’Artagnan’s career from his humble life’s beginnings in Gascony to his death at Maastricht. Although Dumas knew that de Sandras’s version was heavily fictionalised, in the preface to The Three Musketeers he affected to believe that the memoirs were real, in order to make his novel more believable.

D’Artagnan is initially portrayed by Dumas as a hotheaded youth, and tries to engage the Comte de Rochefort and the three musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis in single combat. He quickly becomes friends with the musketeers, and has a series of adventures which put him at odds with Cardinal Richelieu, then First Minister of France. In the end, Richelieu is impressed by d’Artagnan, and makes him a Lieutenant of the Musketeers. This begins his long career of military service, as detailed in the sequels to Dumas’s famous novel. Some scholars believe aspects of D’Artagnan are drawn from the life and character of Dumas’s mulatto father, the General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, as when D’Artagnan challenges Porthos, Athos, and Aramis to duels on the same afternoon, when Dumas describes his face as “brown,” or on an incident in General Dumas’s youth when he was insulted, or on General Dumas’s youthful companionship with fellow soldiers in the Queen’s Dragoons.

D’Artagnan’s role among the Musketeers is one of leadership (his skills and brains impress the musketeers greatly), but he is also regarded as a sort of protégé given his youth and inexperience. The musketeers (especially Athos) see him not only as a best friend and fellow musketeer (despite his initial job as a guard) but as a son. They are very protective of him, though they usually let him take care of himself like the others.

Another Comte d’Artagnan, Pierre de Montesquiou, contributed the idea that Dumas’s d’Artagnan should become a Marshal of France. Towards the end of the story, his death at the siege of Maastricht is given an extra tragic twist – he is mortally wounded whilst reading the notice of his promotion to the highest rank.

In other works

French poet Edmond Rostand wrote the play Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897. After one of the play’s famous scenes, in which Cyrano defeats Valvert in a duel while completing a poem, d’Artagnan approaches Cyrano and congratulates him on his fine swordsmanship.

In Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver a story of d’Artagnan’s death is related by one of the characters, Half-Cocked Jack.

 

Kibbutz

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A Kibbutz , plural Kibbutzim , from the Hebrew word meaning “gathering” or “together,” is an Israeli collective community. The Kibbutzim movement combines socialism and Zionism in a form of practical Labor Zionism, founded at a time when independent farming was not practical. Forced by necessity into communal life, and inspired by their own socialist ideology, kibbutz members developed a pure communal mode of living that attracted interest from the entire world. Of particular interest was their collective mode of child-rearing, in which the children, like all their property, were considered as under collective ownership and responsibility. The Children’s Societies provided a place and adults who raised all the children together, meeting their parents only at scheduled visits.

While the kibbutzim lasted for several generations as utopian communities, most of today’s kibbutzim are scarcely different from the capitalist enterprises and regular towns to which they were originally supposed to be alternatives. Today, farming has been partially abandoned in many cases, with technology industries commonly replacing them. Nuclear families have replaced the Children’s Societies.

Though the kibbutz movement never accounted for more than seven percent of the Israeli population, it did more to shape the image Israelis have of their country, and the image that foreigners have of Israel, than any other Israeli institution.

Ideology of the Kibbutz movement

The spiritualism of the pioneers of the kibbutz movement consisted of mystical feelings about Jewish work, articulated by labor Zionists like Berl Katznelson, who said, “everywhere the Jewish laborer goes, the divine presence goes with him.”

In addition to redeeming the Jewish nation through work, there was also an element of redeeming Eretz Yisrael, or Palestine, in the kibbutz ideology.

Kibbutz members took pleasure in bringing the land back to life by planting trees, draining swamps, and countless other activities to make the land more fertile. In soliciting donations, kibbutzim and other Zionist settlement activities presented themselves as “making the desert bloom.”

The first kibbutzniks hoped to be more than plain farmers in Palestine. They wanted to create a new type of society where there would be no exploitation of anyone and where all would be equal. The early kibbutzniks wanted to be both free from working for others and free from the guilt of exploiting hired work. Thus was born the idea that Jews would band together, holding their property in common, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Kibbutz members were not orthodox Marxists. Marxists did not believe in nations, whereas those kibbutzniks who leaned toward nationalistic Zionism did. Traditional Marxists were hostile to Zionism, even its communist manifestations. Although kibbutzniks practiced communism themselves, they did not believe that communism would work for everyone. Kibbutz political parties never called for the abolition of private property; Kibbutzniks saw kibbutzim as collective enterprises within a free market system.

History

Origins

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conditions were especially hard for the Jews of the Russian Empire. It was the underlying policy of the Russian government in its May Laws to “cause one-third of the Jews to emigrate, one-third to accept baptism, and one-third to starve.” Except for a wealthy few, Jews could not leave the Pale of Settlement; within it, Jews could neither live in large cities, such as Kiev, nor any village with fewer than 500 residents, even if a person needed rural medical recuperation. In case any Jews made their way into Moscow, in 1897, the Moscow Chief of Police offered a bounty for the capture of an illegal Jew equal to the capture of two burglars.

Jews responded to the pressures on them in different ways. Some saw their future in a reformed Russia and joined Socialist political parties. Others saw the future of Jews in Russia as being out of Russia, and thus emigrated to the West. Last, but not least, among the ideological choices that presented themselves to Jews in late nineteenth century Russia was Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the cradle of Judaism, Palestine, or, as Jews called it, Eretz Yisrael.

In the 1880s, approximately 15,000 Jews, mostly from southern Russia, moved to Palestine with the dual intentions of living there and farming there. This movement of Jews to Palestine in the 1880s is called the “First Aliyah.”

The First Kibbutzim.

The Jews of the First Aliyah generation believed that Diaspora Jews had sunk low due to their typical disdain for physical labor. Their ideology was that the Jewish people could be “redeemed physically as well as spiritually by toiling in the fields of Palestine.”

The Biluim came to Eretz Yisrael with high hopes of success as a peasant class, but their enthusiasm was perhaps greater than their agricultural ability. Within a year of living in Palestine, the Biluim had become dependent on charity, just as their scholarly brethren in Jerusalem were. Thanks to donations from extremely wealthy Jews, such as Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, the Biluim were able to eventually prosper. Their towns, Rishon LeZion, Rehovot, and Gedera developed into dynamic communities while their culture of labor evolved: Instead of cultivating the soil on their own land, the Biluim hired Arabs to work the land in their place.

Tensions flared up once again in Russia in the first years of the twentieth century, which inspired another wave of Russian Jews to emigrate. As in the 1880s, most emigrants went to the United States, but a minority went to Palestine. It was this generation that would include the founders of the kibbutzim.

Most members of the Second Aliyah wanted to farm the land, but becoming independent farmers was not a realistic option. In 1909, Joseph Baratz, nine other men, and two women established themselves at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee near an Arab village called “Umm Juni.” These teenagers had hitherto worked as day laborers draining swamps, as masons, or as hands at the older Jewish settlements. Their dream was now to work for themselves, building up the land.

Ottoman Palestine was a harsh environment, quite unlike the Russian plains the Jewish immigrants were familiar with. The Galilee was swampy, the Judean Hills rocky, and the South of the country, the Negev, was a desert. Living collectively was simply the most logical way to be secure in an unwelcoming land. On top of considerations of safety, there were also those of economic survival. Establishing a new farm in the area was a capital-intensive project; collectively the founders of the kibbutzim had the resources to establish something lasting, while independently they did not.

They called their community “Kvutzat Degania,” after the cereals where they grew up. Their community would grow into the first kibbutz. Baratz wrote about his experiences:

We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country—this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn’t be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.

Development

Despite facing significant difficulties, kibbutzim grew and proliferated. By 1914, Degania had fifty members. Other kibbutzim were founded around the Sea of Galilee and the nearby Jezreel Valley. The founders of Degania themselves soon left Degania to become apostles of agriculture and socialism for newer kibbutzim.

Kibbutzim and the whole Jewish community in Palestine grew as a result of the increase in Anti-Semitism in Europe. In contrast to the prediction anti-Zionist Jews had made prior to World War I, the spread of liberal ideas was not irreversible and the position of Jews in many Central and Eastern European societies actually deteriorated. To escape the pogroms, tens of thousands of Russian Jews immigrated to Palestine in the early 1920s, in a wave of immigration that was called the “Third Aliyah.” In contrast to those who came as part of the Second Aliyah, these youth group members had some agricultural training before embarking and had already held meetings and made preparations to begin kibbutz life.

Kibbutzim founded in the 1920s, tended to be larger than the kibbutzim founded prior to World War I. Degania had only twelve members at its founding. Ein Harod, founded only a decade later, began with 215 members. Altogether, kibbutzim grew and flourished in the 1920s. In 1922, there were scarcely 700 individuals living on kibbutzim in Palestine. By 1927, the kibbutz population was approaching 4,000. By the eve of World War II, the kibbutz population was 25,000, 5 percent of the total population of the whole Yishuv settlement.

Challenges

The establishment of Israel and the flood of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Muslim world presented challenges and opportunities for kibbutzim. The immigrant tide offered kibbutzim a chance to expand through new members and inexpensive labor, but it also meant that Ashkenazi kibbutzim would have to adapt to Jews whose background was far different from their own.

Many of the kibbutzim were secular, even staunchly atheistic, although they wanted their new communities to have Jewish characteristics nonetheless. Friday nights were still “Shabbat” with a white tablecloth and fine food, and work was not done on Saturday if it could be avoided. Kibbutzniks marked holidays like Shavuot, Sukkot, and Passover with dances, meals, and celebrations.

A major challenge that kibbutzim faced was the question of how to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, or mizrahi. Many kibbutzim found themselves hiring Mizrahim to work their fields and expand infrastructure, but not actually admitting very many as members. Since few Mizrahim would ever join kibbutzim, the percentage of Israelis living on kibbutzim peaked around the time of statehood.

Kibbutzniks enjoyed a steady and gradual improvement in their standard of living in the first few decades after independence. In the 1960s, kibbutzim actually saw their standard of living improve faster than Israel’s general population. The prestige that kibbutzniks enjoyed in Israel in the 1960s was reflected in the Knesset. When only four percent of Israelis were kibbutzniks, kibbutzniks made up 15 percent of Israel’s parliament.

Life in the Kibbutzim

Until the 1970s, the principle of equality was taken extremely seriously by all kibbutzim. Kibbutzniks did not individually own animals, tools, or even clothing. All gifts and income received from outside were turned over to the common treasury.

Social lives

Social lives were held in common as well. At some kibbutzim husbands and wives were discouraged from sitting together at communal meals, as marriage was a kind of exclusivity.

Although major decisions about the future of the kibbutz were made by consensus or by voting, day-to-day decisions about where people would work were made by elected leaders. Typically, kibbutzniks would learn their assignments by reading an assignment sheet.

Kibbutzim attempted to rotate people into different jobs. One week a person might work in planting, the next with livestock, the week after in the kibbutz factory and the following week in the laundry. Even managers would have to work in menial jobs. Through rotation, people took part in every kind of work, but it interfered with any process of specialization.

From the beginning, Kibbutzim had a reputation as culture-friendly and nurturing of the arts. Many kibbutzniks were and are writers, actors, or artists. In 1953, Givat Brenner staged the play My Glorious Brothers, about the Maccabee revolt, building a real village on a hilltop as a set, planting real trees, and performing for 40,000 people. Like all kibbutz work products at the time, all the actors were members of the kibbutz, and all were ordered to perform as part of their work assignments.

Children

The arrival of children at a new kibbutz posed certain problems. If kibbutzniks owned everything in common, then who was in charge of the children? This question was answered by regarding the children as belonging to all, even to the point of kibbutz mothers breastfeeding babies which were not their own.

In the 1920s kibbutzim began a practice of raising children communally away from their parents in special communities called “Children’s Societies,” or Mossad Hinuchi. The theory was that trained nurses and teachers would be better care-providers than so-called amateur parents. Children and parents would have better relationships due to the Children’s Societies, since parents would not have to be disciplinarians, and there would exist no Oedipus complex. Also, it was hoped that raising children away from parents would liberate mothers from their “biological tragedy.” Instead of spending hours a day raising children, women could thus be free to work or enjoy leisure.

In the heyday of Children’s Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. As children got older, parents would sometimes go for days on end without seeing their offspring, except from chance encounters on the grounds of the kibbutz. Kibbutzim Children’s Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders.

Some children who went through Children’s Societies said they loved the experience, others remain ambivalent, while still others maintain that growing up without one’s parents was very difficult. Years later, a kibbutz member described her childhood in a Children’s Society:

“Allowed to suckle every four hours, left to cry and develop our lungs, we grew up without the basic security needed for survival. Sitting on the potty at regular intervals next to other children doing the same, we were educated to be the same; but we were, for all that, different … At night the grownups leave and turn off all the lights. You know you will wet the bed because it is too frightening to go to the lavatory.”

Gender roles

In the early days of the kibbutz movement the Kibbutzim tended to be male-dominated. The original female members had to perform many of the same tasks given to the male members, such as working in the fields. In many cases the women were still expected to perform traditional female roles, such as cooking, sewing, and cleaning in addition.

Eventually women in all the kibbutzim were allowed and even expected to do the same work as men, including armed guard duty. The desire to liberate women from traditional maternal duties was another ideological underpinning of the Children’s Society system. Interestingly, women born on kibbutzim were much less reluctant to perform traditional female roles. It was the generation of women born on kibbutzim that eventually ended the Societies of Children. Also, although there was a “masculinization of women,” there was no corresponding “feminization” of men. Women may have worked the fields, but men did not work in childcare.

Psychological aspects

In the era of independent Israel kibbutzim attracted interest from sociologists and psychologists who attempted to answer the question: What are the effects of life without private property? Or, what are the effects of life being brought up apart from one’s parents?

Two researchers who wrote about psychological life on kibbutzim were Melford E. Spiro (1958) and Bruno Bettelheim (1969). Both concluded that a kibbutz upbringing led to individuals’ having greater difficulty in making strong emotional commitments thereafter, such as falling in love or forming a lasting friendship. On the other hand, they appeared to find it easier to have a large number of less-involved friendships, and a more active social life.

Other researchers came to the conclusion that children growing up in these tightly knit communities tended to see the other children around them as ersatz siblings and preferred to seek mates outside the community when they reached maturity. Some theorized that living amongst one another on a daily basis virtually from birth on produced an extreme version of the Westermarck effect, which subconsciously diminished teenage kibbutzniks’ sexual attraction to one another. Partly as a result of not finding a mate from within the kibbutz, youth often abandoned kibbutz life as adults.

Economics

Even prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, kibbutzim had begun to branch out from agriculture into manufacturing. Kibbutz Degania, for instance, set up a factory to fabricate diamond cutting tools; it now grosses several million dollars a year. Kibbutz Hatzerim has a factory for drip irrigation equipment. Hatzerim’s business, called Netafim, is a multinational corporation that grosses over $300 million a year. Maagan Michael branched out from making bullets to making plastics and medical tools. Maagan Michael’s enterprises earn over $100 million a year. A great wave of kibbutz industrialization came in the 1960s, and today only 15 percent of kibbutz members work in agriculture.

Future

Kibbutzim have gradually and steadily become less collectivist. Rather than the principle of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” kibbutzim have adopted “from each according to his preferences, to each according to his needs.”

The first changes to be made were in utilities and in the dining hall. When electricity was free, kibbutzniks had no incentive to save energy. In the 1980s, kibbutzim began to meter energy usage. Having kibbutzniks pay for energy usage required kibbutzniks to have personal money.

Eating arrangements also had to change. When food was free, people had no incentive to take the appropriate amount. Every kibbutz dining hall would end the night with enormous amounts of extra food; often this food would be fed to the animals. Now 75 percent of kibbutz dining halls are pay as you go a la carte cafeterias.

Though Kibbutzniks see their neighbors more than other Israelis, they have begun to live private lives. Most kibbutz dining halls are no longer even open for three meals a day. Group activities are much less well attended than they were in the past and are now infrequently scheduled.

In the 1970s, nearly all kibbutzim abandoned Children’s Societies in favor of the traditional nuclear family. The reasons were many. Some kibbutzim believed that communal life for children led to psychological problems; some said that giving up one’s children was too great a sacrifice for parents.

Kibbutzniks no longer expect to transform the rest of Israel, or the globe, into one large collectivist project, but they have not given up on changing the world in smaller ways. Kibbutzniks are prominent in Israel’s environmental movement. Some kibbutzim try to generate all their power through solar cells. Kibbutzniks are also prominent among Israel’s peace activists.

Legacy

Although there may be hundreds of entities in Israel calling themselves kibbutzim, the collectivist impulse is gone. Some kibbutzim have been criticized for “abandoning” socialist principles and turning to capitalist projects in order to make the kibbutz more self-sufficient economically. Numerous kibbutzim have moved away from farming and instead developed parts of their property for commercial and industrial purposes, building shopping malls and factories on kibbutz land that serve and employ non-kibbutz members while the kibbutz retains a profit from land rentals or sales. Conversely, kibbutzim which have not engaged in this sort of development have also been criticized for becoming dependent on state subsidies to survive.

Nonetheless, kibbutzniks played a role in Yishuv society and then Israeli society, far out of proportion to their population. From Moshe Dayan to Ehud Barak, kibbutzniks have served Israel in positions of leadership. Kibbutzim also contributed greatly to the growing Hebrew culture movement. Likewise, kibbutzim have disproportionately affected the views that the rest of the world has of Israel and the image Israelis have of their country.

Lewis Carroll

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, clergyman, and photographer who is best remembered today as one of the world’s most beloved authors of children’s stories and nonsense poetry. Carroll’s genius for surreal storytelling, wordplay, and pure humor has made him one of the most enduring and critically acclaimed of all writers in the genre. His most famous works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems “The Hunting of the Snark” and “Jabberwocky.”

Carroll’s facility at word play, logic, and fantasy has delighted audiences ranging from children to the literary elite. But beyond this, his work has become embedded deeply in modern culture, and he has influenced a wide range of artists, from other children’s writers to literary giants such as Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce.

Life

Antecedents

Dodgson’s family was predominantly northern English, with some Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson’s ancestors were British Army officers or Church of England clergymen. His great-grandfather, also Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become a bishop; his grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in 1803, when his two sons were hardly more than babies.

The elder of these sons—yet another Charles—was Carroll’s father. He reverted to the other family business and took holy orders. He went to Rugby School, and from there to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827, and retired into obscurity as a country parson.

Young Charles

Young Charles Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Warrington, Cheshire, the oldest boy and already the third child of the four-and-a-half year old marriage. Eight more were to follow and, remarkably for the time, all of them—seven girls and four boys —survived into adulthood. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in north Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious Rectory. This remained their home for the next twenty-five years.

In his early years, young Dodgson was educated at home. His “reading lists” preserved in the family testify to a precocious intellect: At the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress. He also suffered from a stammer—a condition shared by his siblings—that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At twelve he was sent away to a small private school at nearby Richmond, where he appears to have been happy and settled. But in 1845, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently greatly depressed.

Oxford

He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and, after an interval which remains unexplained, went on in January 1851 to Oxford, attending his father’s old college, Christ Church. He had only been at Oxford two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of “inflammation of the brain”—perhaps meningitis or a stroke—at the age of forty-seven.

His early academic career veered between high-octane promise and irresistible distraction. He may not always have worked hard, but he was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In 1852, he received a first in Honour Moderations, and shortly after he was nominated to a Studentship by his father’s old friend Canon Edward Pusey. However, a little later he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. The income was good, but the work bored him. Many of his pupils were older and richer than he was, and almost all of them were uninterested. However, despite early unhappiness, Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death.

Dodgson the artist

From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. “I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day,” he wrote in July 1855.

In 1856, he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A very predictable little romantic poem called “Solitude” appeared in The Train under the authorship of “Lewis Carroll.”

In the same year, 1856, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him his young family, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson’s life, and greatly influence his writing career over the following years. Dodgson became close friends with the mother, Lorina, and the children, particularly the three sisters: Ina, Edith, and Alice Liddell. Although Dodgson himself later denied his “little heroine” was based on any real child,, he is widely assumed to have derived his own “Alice” from Alice Liddell. There is an acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking Glass which supports this view. Reading downward, taking the first letter of each line, spells out Alice’s name in full. The poem has no title in Through the Looking Glass but is usually referred to by its first line, “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky.”

Though information is scarce, it does seem clear that his friendship with the family was an important part of his life in the late 1850s, and he grew into the habit of taking the children (first the boy, Harry, and later the three girls) on rowing trips to nearby Nuneham or Godstow.

It was on one such expedition, on July 4, 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story to Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down. Dodgson eventually presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, in November 1864.

Before this, the family of friend and mentor, George MacDonald, read Dodgson’s incomplete manuscript and the enthusiasm of the MacDonald children encouraged Dodgson to seek publication. In 1863, he had taken the unfinished manuscript to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in 1865. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently realized that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist.

The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson’s life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego, Lewis Carroll soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail and with sometimes unwanted attention. He also began earning quite substantial sums of money. However, perhaps oddly, he didn’t use this income as a means of abandoning his post at Christ Church which he apparently disliked.

In 1872, a sequel—Through the Looking-Glass—was published. Its somewhat darker mood possibly reflects the changes in Dodgson’s life. His father had recently died (1868), plunging him into a depression that would last some years.

In 1876, Dodgson produced his last great work, The Hunting of the Snark, a fantastic nonsense poem exploring the adventures of a bizarre crew of variously inadequate beings, and one beaver, who set off to find the eponymous creature.

The later years

Over the remaining twenty years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, Dodgson’s existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, remaining in residence there until his death. His last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, was published in 1889 and 1893 respectively. Its extraordinary convolutions and apparent confusion baffled most readers, achieving little success. He died at his sisters’ home in Guildford on January 14 1898 of pneumonia following influenza. He was not quite sixty-six years old. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.

 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children’s literature which is generally acclaimed as Dodgson’s masterpiece. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into Wonderland, a fantasy realm populated by talking playing cards, anthropomorphic creatures, and other fantastical beings.

The tale is fraught with satirical allusions to Dodgson’s friends and to life in the United Kingdom during the mid nineteenth century in general. The Wonderland described in the story is a place where logic and rules and reality are turned upside-down in ways that have made the story enduringly popular with adults, as well as children.

The book is often referred to by the abbreviated title Alice in Wonderland. This alternate title was popularized by the numerous film and television adaptations of the story produced over the years.

History

Alice was first published on July 4, 1865, exactly three years after the Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat up the River Thames with three little girls:

• Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13) (“Prima” in the book’s prefatory verse)
• Alice Pleasance Liddell (aged 10) (“Secunda” in the prefatory verse)
• Edith Mary Liddell (aged 8) (“Tertia” in the prefatory verse)

The journey had started at Folly Bridge near Oxford, ending five miles away in the village of Godstow. To while away time the Reverend Dodgson told the girls a story that, not so coincidentally, featured a bored little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure.

The girls loved the story so much that they asked Dodgson to write it down for them. He eventually did so and on November 26, 1864, he presented Alice with the first manuscript version of the story, which was titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. According to Dodgson’s diaries, in the spring of 1863, he gave the unfinished manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground to his friend and mentor George MacDonald, whose children loved it. On MacDonald’s advice, Dodgson decided to submit Alice for publication. Before he had even finished the manuscript for Alice Liddell, he was already expanding the 18,000 word original to 35,000 words, most notably adding the episodes about the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Tea-Party. In 1865, Dodgson’s tale was published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by “Lewis Carroll.”

The entire print run sold out quickly. Alice was a publishing sensation, beloved by children and adults alike. Among its first avid readers were the young Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria. The book hasn’t been out of print since. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into over 50 languages, including Esperanto and Faroese. There have now been over a hundred editions of the book, as well as countless adaptations in other media, especially theater and film.

Plot summary

In the novel, a girl named Alice is bored while on a picnic with her older sister. Everything changes when, idly looking around, she sees a passing white rabbit, dressed in a waistcoat and muttering “Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!” The rabbit, who seems to be in a dire hurry, quickly scurries by, and Alice, without a second’s pause, follows after him down a rabbit-hole.

As soon as she’s entered the rabbit-hole, Alice finds herself floating down into a dream world unlike anything she could have ever imagined. As she attempts to follow the rabbit, she has myriad adventures: She grows to gigantic size and later shrinks to a the size of a miniature; she meets a group of small animals stranded in a sea of tears; she gets trapped in the rabbit’s house when her body spontaneously enlarges again; she meets a baby which changes into a pig, and a cat which disappears leaving only his smile behind; she goes to a never-ending tea party run by a lunatic in a hat; she goes to the shore and meets a Gryphon and a wisecracking turtle; and finally, she attends the trial of the Knave of Hearts, who has been accused of stealing tarts. After all of these fantastic adventures, Alice reaches the end of Wonderland and wakes up, back with her sister.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire ( April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire’s highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others. He is credited with coining the term “modernity” (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Baudelaire the poet

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness. This obsessive idea is above all a child of giant cities, of the intersecting of their myriad relations.

—Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris

Baudelaire is one of the major innovators in French literature. His poetry is influenced by the French romantic poets of the earlier 19th century, although its attention to the formal features of verse connect it more closely to the work of the contemporary “Parnassians”. As for theme and tone, in his works we see the rejection of the belief in the supremacy of nature and the fundamental goodness of man as typically espoused by the romantics and expressed by them in rhetorical, effusive and public voice in favor of a new urban sensibility, an awareness of individual moral complexity, an interest in vice (linked with decadence) and refined sensual and aesthetical pleasures, and the use of urban subject matter, such as the city, the crowd, individual passers-by, all expressed in highly ordered verse, sometimes through a cynical and ironic voice. Formally, the use of sound to create atmosphere, and of “symbols”, (images which take on an expanded function within the poem), betray a move towards considering the poem as a self-referential object, an idea further developed by the Symbolists Verlaine and Mallarmé, who acknowledge Baudelaire as a pioneer in this regard.

Beyond his innovations in versification and the theories of symbolism and “correspondences”, an awareness of which is essential to any appreciation of the literary value of his work, aspects of his work which regularly receive (or have received) much critical discussion include the role of women, the theological direction of his work and his alleged advocacy of “satanism”, his experience of drug-induced states of mind, the figure of the dandy, his stance regarding democracy and its implications for the individual, his response to the spiritual uncertainties of the time, his criticisms of the bourgeois, and his advocacy of modern music and painting (e.g., Wagner, Delacroix).

Early life

Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on April 9, 1821, and baptized two months later at Saint-Sulpice Roman Catholic Church. His father, François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was thirty-four years older than Baudelaire’s mother. François died during Baudelaire’s childhood, in 1827. The following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts. Biographers have often seen this as a crucial moment, considering that finding himself no longer the sole focus of his mother’s affection left him with a trauma which goes some way to explaining the excesses later apparent in his life. He stated in a letter to her that, “There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you”. Baudelaire regularly implored his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner.

Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded. Baudelaire at fourteen was described by a classmate: “He was much more refined and distinguished than any of our fellow pupils [...] we are bound to one another[...] by shared tastes and sympathies, the precocious love of fine works of literature”. Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to “idleness”. Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law, a popular course for those not yet decided on any particular career. Baudelaire began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. Baudelaire began to run up debts, mostly for clothes. Upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother “I don’t feel I have a vocation for anything.” His stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy, but instead Baudelaire decided to embark upon a literary career. His mother later recalled: “Oh, what grief! If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have been very different… He would not have left a name in literature, it is true, but we should have been happier, all three of us”.

His stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India, in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, that he later employed in his poetry. (Baudelaire later exaggerated his aborted trip to create a legend about his youthful travels and experiences, including “riding on elephants”.) Baudelaire returned to the taverns where he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. At twenty-one, he received a good-sized inheritance but squandered much of it within a few years. His family obtained a decree to place his property in trust which he resented bitterly, at one point arguing that allowing him to fail alone financially would have been the one sure way of teaching him the value of maintaining well-ordered finances.

Baudelaire became known in artistic circles as a dandy and free-spender. During this time Jeanne Duval became his mistress. His mother thought Duval a “Black Venus” who “tortured him in every way” and drained him of money at every opportunity. She was rejected by his family. He made a suicide attempt during this time.

Baudelaire took part in the Revolutions of 1848 and wrote for a revolutionary newspaper. However, his interest was passing, as he was later to note in his political writings in his journals.

In the early 1850s, Baudelaire struggled with poor health, pressing debts, and irregular literary output. He often moved from one lodging to another to escape creditors. He received many projects that he was unable to complete, though he did finish translations of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

Upon the death of his stepfather in 1857, Baudelaire received no mention in the will but he was heartened nonetheless that the division with his mother might now be mended. At thirty-six he wrote her: “believe that I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only to you”.

Published career

His first published work was his art review “Salon of 1845,” which attracted immediate attention for its boldness. Many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, including his championing of Delacroix, and some of his views seem remarkably in tune with the future theories of the Impressionist painters.

In 1846, Baudelaire wrote his second Salon review, gaining additional credibility as an advocate and critic of Romanticism. His support of Delacroix as the foremost Romantic artist gained widespread notice. The following year Baudelaire’s novella La Fanfarlo was published.

The Flowers of Evil

Baudelaire was a slow and fastidious worker, often sidetracked by indolence, emotional distress and illness, and it was not until 1857 that he published his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). Some of these poems had already appeared in the Revue des deux mondes (Review of Two Worlds), when they were published by Baudelaire’s friend Auguste Poulet Malassis.

The poems found a small, appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The effect on fellow artists was, as Théodore de Banville stated, “immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear”. Flaubert, recently attacked in a similar fashion for Madame Bovary (and acquitted), was impressed and wrote to Baudelaire: “You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism… You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist”.

The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous. He also touched on lesbianism, sacred and profane love, metamorphosis, melancholy, the corruption of the city, lost innocence, the oppressiveness of living, and wine. Notable in some poems is Baudelaire’s use of imagery of the sense of smell and of fragrances, which is used to evoke feelings of nostalgia and past intimacy.

The book, however, quickly became a byword for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Some critics called a few of the poems “masterpieces of passion, art and poetry” but other poems were deemed to merit no less than legal action to suppress them. J. Habas writing in Le Figaro, led the charge against Baudelaire, writing: “Everything in it which is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything one understands is putrid”. Then Baudelaire responded to the outcry, in a prophetic letter to his mother:

“You know that I have always considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me. But this book, whose title (Fleurs du mal) says everything, is clad, as you will see, in a cold and sinister beauty. It was created with rage and patience. Besides, the proof of its positive worth is in all the ill that they speak of it. The book enrages people. Moreover, since I was terrified myself of the horror that I should inspire, I cut out a third from the proofs. They deny me everything, the spirit of invention and even the knowledge of the French language. I don’t care a rap about all these imbeciles, and I know that this book, with its virtues and its faults, will make its way in the memory of the lettered public, beside the best poems of V. Hugo, Th. Gautier and even Byron.”

Baudelaire, his publisher and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals. They were fined but Baudelaire was not imprisoned. Six of the poems were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves (The Wrecks) (Brussels, 1866). Another edition of Les Fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861. Many notables rallied behind Baudelaire and condemned the sentence. Victor Hugo wrote to him: “Your fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars… I applaud your vigorous spirit with all my might”. Baudelaire did not appeal the judgment but his fine was reduced. Nearly 100 years later, on May 11, 1949, Baudelaire was vindicated, the judgment officially reversed, and the six banned poems reinstated in France.

In the poem “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”) that prefaces Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire accuses his readers of hypocrisy and of being as guilty of sins and lies as the poet:

…If rape or arson, poison or the knife

Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff

Of this drab canvas we accept as life—

It is because we are not bold enough!

(Roy Campbell’s translation)

Final years

Baudelaire next worked on a translation and adaptation of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Other works in the years that followed included Petits Poèmes en prose (Small Prose poems); a series of art reviews published in the Pays, Exposition universelle (Country, World Fair); studies on Gustave Flaubert (in L’Artiste, October 18, 1857); on Théophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, September 1858); various articles contributed to Eugene Crepet’s Poètes francais; Les Paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch (French poets; Artificial Paradises: opium and hashish) (1860); and Un Dernier Chapitre de l’histoire des oeuvres de Balzac (A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac) (1880), originally an article “Comment on paye ses dettes quand on a du génie” (“How one pays one’s debts when one has genius”), in which his criticism turns against his friends Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval.

By 1859, his illnesses, his long-term use of laudanum, his life of stress and poverty had taken a toll and Baudelaire had aged noticeably. But at last, his mother relented and agreed to let him live with her for a while at Honfleur. Baudelaire was productive and at peace in the seaside town, his poem Le Voyage being one example of his efforts during that time. In 1860, he became an ardent supporter of Richard Wagner.

His financial difficulties increased again, however, particularly after his publisher Poulet Malassis went bankrupt in 1861. In 1864, he left Paris for Belgium, partly in the hope of selling the rights to his works and also to give lectures. His long-standing relationship with Jeanne Duval continued on-and-off, and he helped her to the end of his life. Baudelaire’s relationships with actress Marie Daubrun and with courtesan Apollonie Sabatier, though the source of much inspiration, never produced any lasting satisfaction. He smoked opium, and in Brussels he began to drink to excess. Baudelaire suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. After more than a year of aphasia, he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. The last two years of his life were spent, in a semi-paralyzed state, in “maisons de santé” in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on August 31, 1867. Baudelaire is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

Many of Baudelaire’s works were published posthumously. After his death, his mother paid off his substantial debts, and at last she found some comfort in Baudelaire’s emerging fame. “I see that my son, for all his faults, has his place in literature”. She lived another four years.

Critiques

Baudelaire was an active participant in the artistic life of his times. As critic and essayist, he wrote extensively and perceptively about the luminaries and themes of French culture. He was frank with friends and enemies, rarely took the diplomatic approach and sometimes responded violently verbally, which often undermined his cause. His associations were numerous and included: Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Franz Liszt, Champfleury, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Balzac and the artists and writers that follow.

Edgar Allan Poe

In 1846 and 1847, Baudelaire became acquainted with the works of Poe, in which he found tales and poems that had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. Baudelaire had much in common with Poe (who died in 1849 at age forty). The two poets display a similar sensibility of the macabre and supernatural turn of mind; each struggled with illness, poverty, and melancholy. Like Poe, Baudelaire believed in the doctrine of original sin, denounced democracy and the idea of progress and of man’s natural goodness, and Poe held a disdainful aristocratic attitude similar to Baudelaire’s dandy. Baudelaire saw in Poe a precursor and tried to be his French contemporary counterpart. From this time until 1865, he was largely occupied with translating Poe’s works; his translations were widely praised. Baudelaire was not the first French translator of Poe, but his “scrupulous translations” were considered among the best. These were published as Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary stories) (1852), Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (New extraordinary stories) (1857), Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka, and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses (Grotesque and serious stories) (1865). Two essays on Poe are to be found in his Oeuvres complètes (Complete works) (vols. v. and vi.).

Eugène Delacroix

A strong supporter of the Romantic painter Delacroix, Baudelaire called him “a poet in painting.” Baudelaire also absorbed much of Delacroix’s aesthetic ideas as expressed in his journals. As Baudelaire elaborated in his “Salon of 1846″, “As one contemplates his series of pictures, one seems to be attending the celebration of some grievous mystery… This grave and lofty melancholy shines with a dull light… plaintive and profound like a melody by Weber”. Delacroix, though appreciative, kept his distance from Baudelaire, particularly after the scandal of Les Fleurs du mal. In private correspondence, Delacroix stated that Baudelaire “really gets on my nerves” and he expressed his unhappiness with Baudelaire’s persistent comments about “melancholy” and “feverishness”.

Richard Wagner

Baudelaire had no formal musical training, and knew little of composers beyond Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber. Weber was in some ways Wagner’s precursor, using the leitmotif and conceiving the idea of the “total art work” (“Gesamtkunstwerk”), both of which found Baudelaire’s admiration. Before even hearing Wagner’s music, Baudelaire studied reviews and essays about him, and formulated his impressions. Later, Baudelaire put them into his non-technical analysis of Wagner, which was highly regarded, particularly his essay “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris”. Baudelaire’s reaction to music was passionate and psychological. “Music engulfs (possesses) me like the sea”.After attending three Wagner concerts in Paris in 1860, Baudelaire wrote to the composer: “I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in being overwhelmed, a truly sensual pleasure like that of rising in the air”. Baudelaire’s writings contributed to the elevation of Wagner and to the cult of Wagnerism that swept Europe in the following decades.

Théophile Gautier

Gautier, writer and poet, earned Baudelaire’s respect for his perfection of form and his mastery of language, though Baudelaire thought he lacked deeper emotion and spirituality. Both strove to express the artist’s inner vision, which Heinrich Heine had earlier stated: “In artistic matters, I am a supernaturalist. I believe that the artist can not find all his forms in nature, but that the most remarkable are revealed to him in his soul”. Gautier’s frequent meditations on death and the horror of life are themes which influenced Baudelaire writings. In gratitude for their friendship and commonality of vision, Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier.

Édouard Manet

Manet and Baudelaire became constant companions from around 1855. In the early 1860s, Baudelaire accompanied Manet on daily sketching trips and often met him socially. Manet also lent Baudelaire money and looked after his affairs, particularly when Baudelaire went to Belgium. Baudelaire encouraged Manet to strike his own path and not succumb to criticism. “Manet has great talent, a talent which will stand the test of time. But he has a weak character. He seems to me crushed and stunned by shock”. In his painting Music in the Tuileries, Manet includes portraits of his friends Théophile Gautier, Jacques Offenbach, and Baudelaire. While it’s difficult to differentiate who influenced whom, both Manet and Baudelaire discussed and expressed some common themes through their respective arts. Baudelaire praised the modernity of Manet’s subject matter: “almost all our originality comes from the stamp that ‘time’ imprints upon our feelings”. When Manet’s famous Olympia (1863), a portrait of a nude prostitute, provoked a scandal for its blatant realism mixed with an imitation of Renaissance motifs, Baudelaire worked privately to support his friend, though he offered no public defense (he was, however, ill at the time). When Baudelaire returned from Belgium after his stroke, Manet and his wife were frequent visitors at the nursing home and she would play passages from Wagner for Baudelaire on the piano.

Nadar

Nadar (Félix Tournachon) was a noted caricaturist, scientist and important early photographer. Baudelaire admired Nadar, one of his closest friends, and wrote: “Nadar is the most amazing manifestation of vitality”. They moved in similar circles and Baudelaire made many social connections through him. Nadar’s ex-mistress Jeanne Duval became Baudelaire’s mistress around 1842. Baudelaire became interested in photography in the 1850s and denounced it as an art form and advocated for its return to “its real purpose, which is that of being the servant to the sciences and arts”. Photography should not, according to Baudelaire, encroach upon “the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary”. Nadar remained a stalwart friend right to Baudelaire’s last days and wrote his obituary notice in Le Figaro.

Philosophy

Many of Baudelaire’s philosophical proclamations were considered scandalous and intentionally provocative in his time. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, drawing criticism and outrage from many quarters.

Love

“There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be ‘two’. The man of genius wants to be ‘one’… It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls ‘the need to love’.”

Marriage

“Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.”

The artist

“The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes… Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself.”

Pleasure

“Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing ‘evil’–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.”

“But what matters an eternity of damnation to one who has found an infinity of joy in a single second?”

Politics

Along with Poe, Baudelaire named the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre as his maître à penser and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he wrote “There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”

The Public

“In this regards, my friend, you’re like the public, to whom one should never offer a delicate perfume. It exasperates them. Give them only carefully selected garbage.”

Time

“The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.”

“Each man bears within himself his own dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours can we count filled with pleasure,with prosperous and effective action?”

Influence

Baudelaire’s influence on the direction of modern French (and English) language literature was considerable. The most significant French writers to come after him were generous with tributes; four years after his death, Arthur Rimbaud praised him in a letter as ‘the king of poets, a true God’. In 1895, Stéphane Mallarmé published a sonnet in Baudelaire’s memory, ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’. Marcel Proust, in an essay published in 1922, stated that along with Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire was ‘the greatest poet of the nineteenth century’.

In the English-speaking world, Edmund Wilson credited Baudelaire as providing an initial impetus for the Symbolist movement, by virtue of his translations of Poe. In 1930, T. S. Eliot, while asserting that Baudelaire had not yet received a “just appreciation” even in France, claimed that the poet had “great genius” and asserted that his “technical mastery which can hardly be overpraised… has made his verse an inexhaustible study for later poets, not only in his own language”.Eliot also alluded to Baudelaire’s poetry directly in his own poetry. For example, he quoted the last line of Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ in the last line of Section I of ‘The Waste Land.’

At the same time that Eliot was affirming Baudelaire’s importance from a broadly conservative and explicitly Christian viewpoint, left-wing critics such as Wilson and Walter Benjamin were able to do so from a dramatically different perspective. Benjamin translated Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens into German and published a major essay on translation as the foreword.

In the late 1930s, Benjamin used Baudelaire as a starting point and focus for his monumental attempt at a materialist assessment of 19th century culture, Das Passagenwerk. For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s importance lay in his anatomies of the crowd, of the city and of modernity. François Porche published a poetry collection called Charles Baudelaire in memory of Baudelaire.

In 1982, avant-garde performance artist and vocalist Diamanda Galás recorded an adaptation of his poem The Litanies of Satan (Les Litanies de Satan).

The Baudelaires, protagonists of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, were named after him.

Currently, Vanderbilt University has “assembled one of the world’s most comprehensive research collections on…Baudelaire.”

 

Roy Bean

Phantly Roy Bean, Jr. (c. 1825 – March 16, 1903) was an eccentric U.S. saloon-keeper and Justice of the Peace in Val Verde County, Texas, who called himself “The Law West of the Pecos”. According to legend, Judge Roy Bean held court in his saloon along the Rio Grande in a desolate stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert of southwest Texas. After his death, Western films and books cast him as a hanging judge, though he is known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped.

Early life

Roy Bean was born in 1825 in Mason County, Kentucky, the youngest of five (four sons and a daughter) of Phantly Roy Bean, Sr., and the former Anna Henderson Gore. The family was extremely poor, and at age sixteen Bean left home to ride a flatboat to New Orleans and possible work. After getting into trouble there, Bean fled to San Antonio, Texas to join his older brother Sam.

Samuel Gore “Sam” Bean (1819–1903), who had earlier migrated to Independence, Missouri, was a teamster and bullwhacker. He hauled freight to Santa Fe and then on to Chihuahua, Mexico. After Sam fought in the Mexican–American War, he freighted out of San Antonio, where Roy joined him.

In 1848, the two brothers opened a trading post in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Soon after, Roy Bean shot and killed a Mexican desperado who had threatened “to kill a gringo.” To escape being charged with murder by Mexican authorities, Roy and Sam Bean fled west to Sonora. By the spring of 1849, Bean had moved to San Diego, California, to live with his older brother Joshua. The older Bean was elected the first mayor of the city the following year.

Considered handsome, Roy Bean competed for the attentions of various local girls. A Scotsman named Collins challenged Bean to a pistol-shooting match on horseback. Bean was left to choose the targets, and decided that they would shoot at each other. The duel was fought on February 24, 1852, ending with Collins’ receiving a wound to his right arm. Both men were arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder. In the two months that he was in jail, Bean received many gifts of flowers, food, wine, and cigars from ladies in San Diego. His final gift included knives encased in tamales. Bean used the knives to dig through the cell wall. After escaping on April 17, Bean moved to San Gabriel, California, where he became a bartender for his brother’s saloon, known as the Headquarters Saloon. After Joshua was murdered in November, Bean inherited the saloon.

In 1854, Bean courted a young lady, who was subsequently kidnapped and forced to marry a Mexican officer. Bean challenged the groom to a duel and killed him. Six of the dead man’s friends put Bean on a horse and tied a noose around his head, then left him to hang. The horse did not bolt, and after the men left, the bride, who had been hiding behind a tree, cut the rope. Bean was left with a permanent rope burn on his neck and a permanent stiff neck. Shortly after that, Bean chose to leave California and migrated to New Mexico to live with Sam. The latter had been elected the first sheriff of Doña Ana County. In 1861 Samuel G. and Roy Bean operated a merchandise store and saloon on Main Street in Pinos Altos (just north of Silver City) in present-day Grant County, New Mexico. It advertised liquor and “a fine billiard table.” A cannon belonging to Roy Bean sat in front of the store for show. It was used to repel an Apache assault on the town.

Move to Texas

During the Civil War, the Confederate Army successfully invaded New Mexico. During the Battle of Glorieta Pass in March 1862, however, the Confederates lost their supply wagons and were forced to retreat to San Antonio. After taking money from his brother’s safe, Bean joined the retreating army. For the remainder of the war, he ran the blockade by hauling cotton from San Antonio to British ships off the coast at Matamoros, then returning with supplies. For the next twenty years, Bean lived in San Antonio, working nominally as a teamster. He attempted to run a firewood business, cutting down a neighbor’s timber. He then tried to run a dairy business, but was soon caught watering down the milk, and later worked as a butcher, rustling unbranded cattle from other area ranchers.

On October 28, 1866, he married eighteen-year-old Virginia Chavez. Within a year after they were married, he was arrested for aggravated assault and threatening his wife’s life. Despite the tumultuous marriage, they had four children together – Roy Jr., Laura, Zulema, and Sam. The family lived in “a poverty-stricken Mexican slum area called Beanville” (centered near the corner of South Flores Street and Glenn Avenue, not far from Burbank High School).

By the late 1870s, Bean was operating a saloon in Beanville. Several railroad companies were working to extend the railroads west, and Bean heard that many construction camps were opening. A store owner in Beanville “was so anxious to have this unscrupulous character out of the neighborhood” that she bought all of Bean’s possessions for $900 so that he could leave San Antonio. At the time, Bean and his wife were separated. Bean left his children with friends as he prepared to go west.

Justice of the peace

With his earnings, Bean purchased a tent, some supplies to sell, and ten 55-gallon barrels of whiskey. By the spring of 1882, he had established a small saloon near the Pecos River in a tent city he named Vinegaroon. Within 20 miles (32 km) of the tent city were 8,000 railroad workers. The nearest court was 200 miles (320 km) away at Fort Stockton, and there was little means to stop illegal activity. A Texas Ranger requested that a local law jurisdiction be set up in Vinegaroon, and on August 2, 1882 Bean was appointed Justice of the Peace for the new Precinct 6 in Pecos County. His first case had, however, been heard on 25 July 1882 when Texas Rangers brought him Joe Bell to be tried.

One of his first acts as a justice of the peace was to “shoot[...] up the saloon shack of a Jewish competitor”. Bean then turned his tent saloon into a part-time courtroom and began calling himself the “Law West of the Pecos.” As judge, Bean relied on a single lawbook, the 1879 edition of the Revised Statutes of Texas. If newer lawbooks appeared, Bean used them as kindling.

Bean did not allow hung juries or appeals, and jurors, who were chosen from his best bar customers, were expected to buy a drink during every court recess. Bean was known for his unusual rulings. In one case, an Irishman named Paddy O’Rourke shot a Chinese laborer. A mob of 200 angry Irishmen surrounded the courtroom and threatened to lynch Bean if O’Rourke was not freed. After looking through his law book, Bean ruled that “homicide was the killing of a human being; however, he could find no law against killing a Chinaman”. Bean dismissed the case.

By December 1882, railroad construction had moved further westward, so Bean moved his courtroom and saloon 70 miles (110 km) to Strawbridge. A competitor who was already established in the area laced Bean’s whiskey stores with kerosene. Unable to attract customers, Bean left the area and went to Eagle’s Nest, 20 miles (32 km) west of the Pecos River. The site was soon renamed Langtry.The original owner of the land, who ran a saloon, had sold 640 acres (2.59 km²) to the railroad on the condition that no part of the land could be sold or leased to Bean. O’Rourke, the Irishman Bean had previously acquitted, told Bean to use the railroad right-of-way, which was not covered by the contract. For the next 20 years, Bean squatted on land he had no legal right to claim. Bean named his new saloon The Jersey Lilly in honor of Lillie Langtry, who recounted how she visited the area following the death of Roy Bean in her autobiography. He sent for his children to live with him at the saloon, with youngest son Sam forced to sleep on a pool table.

Langtry did not have a jail, so all cases were settled by fines. Bean refused to send the state any part of the fines, but instead kept all of the money. In most cases, the fines were made for the exact amount in the accused’s pockets. Bean is known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped. Horse thieves, who were often sentenced to death in other jurisdictions, were always let go if the horses were returned. Although only district courts were legally allowed to grant divorces, Bean did so anyway, pocketing $10 per divorce. He charged only $5 for a wedding, and ended all wedding ceremonies with “and may God have mercy on your souls” (traditionally the end of a death sentence).

Bean won re-election to his post in 1884, but was defeated in 1886. The following year, the commissioner’s court created a new precinct in the county and appointed Bean the new justice of the peace. He continued to be elected until 1896. Even after that defeat, he “refused to surrender his seal and law book and continued to try all cases north of the tracks”.

Later years

In 1890, Bean received word that Jay Gould was planning to pass through Langtry on a special train. Bean flagged down the train with the danger signal; thinking the bridge was out, the train engineer stopped. Bean invited Gould and his daughter to visit the saloon as his guests. The Goulds visited for two hours, causing a brief panic on the New York Stock Exchange when it was reported that Gould had been killed in a train crash.

In the last part of his life, Bean met the legendary land surveyor W. D. Twichell, who platted the majority of Texas counties and based in Amarillo by 1890.

In 1896, Bean organized a world championship boxing title bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher on an island in the Rio Grande because boxing matches were illegal in both Texas and Mexico. The fight lasted only 1 minute 35 seconds, but the resulting sport reports spread his fame throughout the United States.

As he aged, Bean spent much of his profits to help the poor of the area, and always made sure that the schoolhouse had free firewood in winter. He died March 16, 1903, peacefully in his bed, after a bout of heavy drinking in San Antonio over the building of a new power plant. He and a son, Sam Bean (1874–1907), are interred at the Whitehead Memorial Museum in Del Rio.