Thursday, 22 March 2007

Post a response to the quote below from p. 270 of your Les Miserables packet. It's a dense quote with archaic diction and style, so give yourself a bit of time to unpack the words. Be sure to first write what you think the quote means, then write which group (the "barbarian" or the "other men") you would choose, and finally explain why. Feel free to respond to other students' responses, too.

"Savage. We must explain this word. What was the aim of those bristling men who in the demiurgic days of revoluationary chaos, raged, howling, wild with tomahawk raised, and pike aloft, rushed over old overturned Paris? They desired the end of oppressions, the end of tyrannies, and the end of the sword, labour for man, instruction for children, social gentleness for woman, liberty, equality, fraternity, bread for all, ideas for all. The Edenisation of the world, Progress; this holy, good, and gentle thing, progress, pushed to the wall and beside themselves, they demanded, terrible, half naked, a club in their grasp, and a roar in their mouth. They were savages, yes; but the savages of civilisation.

They proclaimed the right furiously; they desired, were it through fear and trembling, to force the human race into paradise. They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. With the mask of night they demanded the light.

In contrast with these men, wild, we admit, and terrible, but wild and terrible for the good, there are other men, smiling, embroidered gilded, beribboned, bestarred, in silk stokings, in white feathers, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, leaning upon a velvet table by the corner of a marble mantel, softly insist upon the maintenance and the preservation of the past, the middle ages, deivine right, fanaticism, ignorance, slavery, the death penalty, and war, gloifying politely and in mild tones the sabre, the stake, and the scaffold. As for us, if we were compelled to choose between the barbarians of civilization, and the civilisees of barbarism, we would choose the barbarians."