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IN A NUTSHELL

We explore this beautiful city well beyond its surface - with us, you will find out all you need to know about Parisian history, art and architecture but also great food (especially chocolate), edgy clubs, jazz joints, charming flea markets and much more.

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This is the main point of difference between a bou

This is the main point of difference between a bourgeois and the aristocrat. In their respective minds, the bourgeois needs to work hard to accomplish something, anything - the aristocrat simply is, by birthright and by divine will.

Born into their status, they never question it, as it would mean questioning divine providence and god’s plan. On the other hand is the hard working bourgeois, the one who feels that they need to overcome and ultimately shatter this stale and rigid social order. The way they would eventually succeed in doing so, was amassing of wealth, mostly through banking, trade, and sharp management skills. Of course, also via warfare, raiding and pillaging the neighboring cities, raising armies of mercenaries, and so on – but, in European history, this sort of goes without saying. Also, the aristocrats did that too.

Economically speaking, the wealth creating foundation of the aristocrat was the land they owned, that was worked by the peasants allowed to live on it. The wealth creation machine of the bourgeois was trade, banking, lawyering – those professions, as one knows, are far more profitable than agriculture, especially if one is to trade with distant, exotic parts of the world from where one could acquire spices, silk, and alike.

If one is to be a good peasant, one needs a strong back and a lot of resilience. If one is to be a good aristocrat, one needs a lot of courage in battle and a natural talent for performance. If one is to be a good member of the clergy, one needs a talent for research, great oratory skills, and again, in a slightly different fashion, a talent for performance. Finally, if one is to be a good bourgeois, meaning a banker, a merchant, a lawyer or a city administrator, one needs a sharp mind – a lot of cunning, quick wits, and a capacity of running double books. This has not changed in centuries, and likely never will.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #middleages #medievalparis #aristocracy #bourgeois #bourgeoisie #burgers #cityliving #city #walls #citywalls

The sense of having more resources, not being invo

The sense of having more resources, not being involved in arduous physical labor, and having access to higher education, gave the sense of importance to the medieval bourgeois.

Their economic power and prowess steadily grew and lurched upon the societal prestige that the aristocracy, and especially the clergy, possessed. The aristocrats, from whose ranks most of the higher strata of clergy were recruited, were the ones who owned the land and most of the social privilege. They were seen and treated as naturally, divinely ordained better than everyone else. We will get to this in greater detail later.

Here it is addressed in the context of the frustrated bourgeois, who started acquiring economic potency but still craved social acceptance. The bourgeois therefore started investing into their own culture, mores, education, and finally art. As the medieval period progressed, so too did the ambition of the city dweller, and alongside it, frustration, grew. This naturally left traces, or, more precisely, entirely shaped the notion of the body of the bourgeois. One needs to remember that the medieval period did not know the notion of meritocracy – such an idea would be laughed out of the room. One aristocrat could have been born riddled with mental and physical limitations (as eventually, most of them did) – as compared to the most perfect human specimen born into the third class of the society, where the bourgeois and the peasants were lumped together, they would still have been deemed as their superior, better in every conceivable way.

European history, not only French, is chalk-full of examples of crazy, demented kings and aristocrats on one end, and brilliant plebeians on the other. Still, over centuries, not to say millennia, no one seemed to have seriously question this situation. The bourgeois worked slowly, diligently and patiently, trying to change the paradigm. The idea was that everything that an aristocrat did, they could, should and had to do better. They needed to be smarter, more pious, focused, applied.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #medievalparis #middleages #body #bodypolitics #walls #bourgeois #burger #city #cityliving

The principal difference between the peasant and t

The principal difference between the peasant and the bourgeois, be they a merchant, a banker, a lawyer or some other citadin profession, was that the bourgeois was a city dweller, whereas the peasant was not. The city dweller in the medieval period lived behind city walls, a necessity of every developed urban settlement.

As the story goes, Paris had seven walls in its history, the last one to be taken down as late as the very end of the 18th century. Living behind a wall meant a level of safety the people who lived in the field did not have. This could have been tricky, and often was. City crime existed back then as it does today; wolf raids were not uncommon even for the city, all up until the middle of the 15th century; and the surrounding places had them up until the 18th. While all this was true, living behind stone walls did give a city dweller not only a sense of safety and protection, but also the air of importance. The bourgeois (coming from burg, the old German word for a fortified position- a burger, person living in a burg, in French bourgeois) did not deal with the land, and was not busy tilling the soil. They partook in what would today be considered a ‘white collar’ job. Most likely, they were a trained professional and a member of the guild that brought together and protected them and their colleagues. Their education was higher than that of a peasant, meaning that they had an option of becoming literate, and also had an option of learning Latin. As the cities grew in importance and economic power, so too they demanded more culture and education- Paris was the second city in Europe to create a University (of Paris), which would later become the world-famous Sorbonne.

In continental Europe, unlike in England (where they were modeled after the monasteries), universities were city-bound, and essentially an urban occurrence.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #middleages #paris #medievalparis #body #bodypolitics #university #wall #medievalwalls #rampart #medievalramparts

The body of the medieval peasant was understood in

The body of the medieval peasant was understood in a very direct, material, a matter of fact kind of way. It was an instrument in the world filled with beauty and cruelty, universe as indifferent as it was concrete and insisting. One does not understand the heavy rain, or hail, if one has a field of corn on which success their entire annual diet depends; one does not fret the said natural phenomenon if they live in a concrete building, as opposed to living in a cottage house with a thatched hay roof.

One’s body, being the extension of nature, is not seen and felt the same way. The functions of the body we today consider rude, shameful or at least a thing to be discrete about, were not seen as an inconvenience back in the day. For the most part, people lived in much smaller spaces, so privacy was not an option. The peasantry that was not particularly well of – which is to say, most of them – shared the same lodging space as their farm animals. The constricted space understandably meant no alone time. This meant that not only that peasants didn’t have space nor time for bodily discretion, they also had no space nor time for body shame. It may therefore appear as bizarre knowing that the medieval peasants had no issues making love with the children around. This trait of life, seen as unusual from today’s perspective, was not limited to peasantry, as it was shared throughout the society. The medieval aristocrat would not be bothered by the presence of their servant, nor the Roman lord by the presence of their slaves; the medieval peasant, alike, would not be bothered by the presence of their farm animals, parents or children. Their bodies were in a complete sense of that term, natural, of nature, and belonging to nature.

For the medieval peasant, the body was not the dungeon of the soul. It was more soul concentrated, a material rendition of the soul, than anything else. As such, it communicated with the rest of the world, alive, awakened, and reactive to everything. Nature and body were of one domain.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #middleages #body #bodypolitics #medievalparis #medievalbody

The heavily paganized Christianity, or, to be more

The heavily paganized Christianity, or, to be more precise, the barely Christianized paganism of the medieval peasant, was therefore perfectly in line with how this group understood their bodies, and how they existed and behaved. It was an acting – not performative, but acting - live, immediate type of religion. One that teemed with fetishes and idols, regardless of how, in theory, those were contrary to the official Christian dogma. The belief in the forest sprites and ferries, the field demons and ghosts, the ‘wild hunt’ parties (a predecessor to the Christian idea of the purgatory, stemming from pagan folklore and very likely, Nordic myth), and other colorful aspects of medieval beliefs where bits of classical myth, local lore and fanciful imagination all came together; were more present in a peasant’s life than an abstract, absent, heavily philosophical father in the heavens.

The practical, connected to nature, mattered more than the conceptual. The belief of the medieval peasant was connected to their lives, concrete and filled with agency; one where a person was as immersed in their natural surroundings as we today are separate from it.

This was, of course, not always positive. An example that we shall visit and revisit is one with the forest and wolves. The peasant of the medieval period knew to appreciate the beauty of the forest, but they also knew that in one such beautiful forest, they could very easily be mauled by a bear, gored by a boar or tore apart and devoured by a pack of wolves. One’s immediate surroundings were not, as we from the modern and contemporary perspective tend to idealize them, beautiful alone; they were deadly as well. Nature is harmonious and perfectly balanced in its own manner, one that is often exceptionally violent. The medieval peasant was well aware of this.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #medievalparis #middleages #body #bodypolitics #toursaintjacques #peasant #medievalpeasant #medievalperiod

While seemingly incidental, this is actually highl

While seemingly incidental, this is actually highly relevant and of crucial importance in this particular case of the medieval understanding of the body. The peasant of this period was able to produce anything he used, which meant that they relied on their hands, and nurtured a very concrete and material, as well as materialistic, connection to the world they lived in.

This is profoundly different from today, when we have no idea how things we used are made and are almost always made by someone else, on the other side of the world. Living in today’s Europe, one can eat beef that came from an Argentinian cow, raised and slaughtered by an Argentinian cattle rancher; eat pineapples and mangos, raised by a Philippine farmer; wear clothes made by a Swedish company that holds their production in Bangladesh, and so on. Today, we no longer have the physical connection to the world we live in, as we don’t know how to reproduce anything. Even the exceptionally skilled engineer would not be able to create a computer, or a phone, on their own – it takes roughly thirty thousand engineers to create one micro processing unit alone, not to speak of the rest of the computer.

This was not the case with our medieval peasant, as they were perfectly capable of reproducing the world that surrounded them from scratch. Granted, nothing they had could nearly measure in complexity to the objects we use today (such are smart phones, computers, cars etc.); but they were capable on creating, producing their own material reality, and their immediate surroundings. Not only that they possessed this extended faculty, it was, more often than not, expected of them to go to war, if need be; so, that too was a part of a peasant life. The direct connection one felt with their immediate surroundings, coupled with the fact that they could act upon that surrounding with a far greater amount of agency than we can today (just think about how helpless you feel when electricity goes out), naturally shaped their perspective of the body.

#medieval #medievalarchitecture #medievalart #middleages #medievalparis #body #bodypolitics

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