Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Words and their latent power have long mattered in France.As one graffito from the Paris student protests of May 1968 declared: 'Les murs ont des oreilles.Vos oreilles ont des murs' ('The walls have ears.Your ears have walls.')Barriers and walls, both literal and metaphorical, punctuate French history, serving to define partially what it means to be a child of France.The national motto -liberté, égalité, fraternité -possesses a chant-like rhythm which even today carries an echo of the barricaded-defiance of the 1789 revolution from which it emerged.In the century following that upheaval -and with no little irony -two writers who were to become standard bearers of French literary culture had to try to hurdle the censor's barrier: Flaubert's Madame Bovary was banned in 1856 and soon after that all the sheets of Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal were confiscated.Like the ambiguous flowers in Baudelaire's disquietingly beautiful poetic sermons, words can be intoxicating and they can be dangerous -and no more dangerous than when they are intoxicating.(It was a bit over the top, and perhaps playing to an English gallery, but not for nothing did Aldous Huxley refer to Baudelaire as 'a bored Satanist'. 1 ) Gérald Garutti's self-declared 'manifesto for the arts of speech' therefore taps into a prominent artery of French culture when it declares: Watch your words.
Author: Tom Bradshaw
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7123718336
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