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A history of Supreme Court nominations in election years

It was an election year. A Supreme Court justice appointed by the most conservative Republican president in history had just died. The President, the most progressive Democrat to ever hold that office, now had a chance to begin to reshape the Supreme Court. But the president was up for reelection, with no guarantee he would be reelected. Indeed, in the previous 76 years only two presidents had been elected to two consecutive terms.

The President nominated a famous but controversial public interest lawyer to the Court. He was known for taking on insurance companies, powerful public utilities, and banks. His book, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, hardly endeared him to Wall Street. On top of all this, he was an ethnic minority and the first person of his background to be nominated to the Court.

The Republicans in the Senate were furious. They hoped the nomination would fail, and they held endless hearings trying to undermine support for this man they accused of being a radical, a socialist, and on top of that, “greedy.” But no one in the Senate thought the President should not fill a vacant seat on the Court in an election year. After a four month confirmation process—the longest in our history—the confirmation took place.

The year was 1916. Exactly a hundred years ago. The President was Woodrow Wilson. The nominee was the great progressive lawyer Louis D. Brandeis—the first Jew on the Court at a time of rampant anti-Semitism—who went on to be one of the most important and influential Justices in our history.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has led to political posturing by leaders on the process of his replacement. Senator Ted Cruz has argued that President Obama has no right to nominate a successor to Scalia, and the Texas politician—and presidential hopeful—has promised to filibuster any nomination. Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to prevent the nomination from reaching the floor.

These responses, while perhaps politically predictable, run counter to the entire history of the United States. The Brandeis confirmation took place five months before a presidential election, in June 1916. During the long confirmation process—from January to June—no one argued that President Wilson should not have sent a nomination forward, or that the Senate should not have acted on it. In the end, the opponents of Brandeis failed to stop his confirmation. One of those opponents, ex-President William Howard Taft, later came to admire and respect Brandeis when Taft himself joined the Court.

Brandeis is hardly the only justice to be nominated and confirmed in an election year. In January 1796 George Washington nominated Samuel Chase to the Court. By this time Washington had indicated he would not run for a third term, but no one in the Senate suggested the nation needed to wait more than a year to replace Justice John Blair, who had recently retired.

Between January 1844, an election year, and February 1845, President John Tyler nominated four men to a vacant seat, but none were confirmed. This was not a result of Tyler being in the last year of his term or his lame duck status after November 1845. Rather, the Senate simply did think his nominees were up to the job. But in mid-February 1845—with less than a month to go in his lame duck term—President John Tyler nominated Samuel Nelson to the Court, and he was confirmed in ten days.

In December 1851, eleven months before the next presidential election, Millard Fillmore sent the name of Benjamin R. Curtis to the Senate, and he was confirmed nine days later.

In December 1880, with only a few months to run in his term, the lame duck President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated William B. Woods to the Court. The Senate quickly confirmed him, with no one arguing that the seat should remain open for president-elect Garfield to fill. In July 1892, four months before the 1892 election, the Senate confirmed Benjamin Harrison’s nominee George Shiras. Harrison then lost his bid for reelection in 1892, but in February 1893, less than two weeks before he was to leave office, the Senate confirmed his last nominee, Horace Jackson. In March 1912, less than eight months before the presidential election, the Senate confirmed President William Howard Taft’s nominee Mahlon Pitney.

We have already noted that President Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis in an election year. But a month after the Brandeis confirmation, in July 1916, the Senate confirmed Justice John H. Clarke, Wilson’s second election year nomination.

In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was about as unpopular as a president could be. That fall he would be overwhelmingly defeated for reelection. By July he was already, for any meaningful purpose, a lame duck. But the Senate confirmed without much hesitation the nomination of Benjamin Cardozo. In the election year of 1940 the Senate confirmed Frank Murphy.

In 1987, less than a year before the next presidential election, Ronald Reagan sent Anthony Kennedy’s name to the Senate. In February 1988, less than nine months before the presidential election, the Democratic majority confirmed him, even though at the time many observers expected the Democrats to win the next presidential election. Justice Kennedy remains on the bench today. One wonders if Senators McConnell and Cruz believe Ronald Reagan should not have been allowed to nominate a justice just a few months before he was scheduled to leave office.

There have been three chief justices confirmed in an election year. In 1796, even though he was not planning on running for a third term, George Washington nominated Oliver Ellsworth to be Chief Justice, and the Senate confirmed him. In 1888, just a few months before he would lose his bid for reelection, President Grover Cleveland sent Melville Fuller’s name to the Senate, and he quickly became Chief Justice.

The most important lame duck nomination–even more important than Brandeis– was John Adams’s “gift” to the American people: John Marshall, who is universally considered our greatest Chief Justice. To this day much of our constitutional history and constitutional law focuses on his landmark opinions.

The Marshall nomination came after Adams had been defeated for reelection. But on 27 January 1801, about five weeks before the new president was to take office, the Senate confirmed Marshall by a voice vote, as was the custom of the time. No one suggested that Adams should not fill the office. No one doubted Adams’ obligation to nominate someone for the office, and no one doubted the Senate’s obligation to consider the nomination.

The history of Supreme Court nominations is clear. Until this past week there has never been a suggestion that a sitting president does not have the power to nominate someone for the Court and that the Senate does not have an obligation to consider that nomination. If past Senates had followed the proposals of Senators McConnell and Cruz, then significant justices, including the current Justice Anthony Kennedy, would never have been confirmed. The Supreme Court would have been shorthanded at many crucial moments in our history.

Should Senator Cruz become president, does he want to be told that for the last 25% of his term he will not have the right to fill a seat on the Supreme Court? Is he ready to make a campaign pledge, that if elected he will not nominate anyone to the Supreme Court in the last year of his term?

Senators Cruz and McConnell, and some of their colleagues, insult the memory of presidents from George Washington to Ronald Reagan when they argue that a president should not be able to fill court vacancy during the last year of his term. Is this the legacy these Senate leaders want to have? Perhaps it is time for them to read some history.

Image Credit: “Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia” by Stephen Masker. CC BY 2.o via Wikimedia Commons.

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A short history of the mosquito that transmits Zika virus

Question: What do Napoléon Bonaparte, Walter Reed, the Panama Canal, and the Zika virus all have in common? Answer: The Aedes aegypti mosquito. Although its official common name, according to the Entomological Society of America (ESA), is the “yellowfever mosquito,” Aedes aegypti is also the primary vector of dengue, chikungunya, and the Zika virus. The ability to transmit these and other viruses makes Aedes aegypti one of the deadliest animals in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are an estimated 200,000 cases of yellow fever each year, causing 30,000 deaths, 90 percent of which occur in Africa. The WHO also estimates that about 390 million cases of dengue occur globally each year, and severe cases can be fatal.

Zika, which was detected in the western hemisphere for the first time in 2015, has recently generated an incredible amount of media attention worldwide, as did chikungunya when it was first detected in the western hemisphere in 2013. But the other viruses have been even more devastating, and the Aedes aegypti mosquito has actually changed the course of human history.

Au Revoir, Napoléon

In 1801, a native Haitian named Toussaint L’Ouverture led a slave revolt and declared himself ruler of the former French colony. The following year, 20,000 French soldiers arrived to put down the insurrection under the command of General Victor-Emmanuel LeClerc. The French military triumphed over the Haitians in battle, but they were unable to withstand the damage inflicted upon them by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and the yellow fever virus that they transmitted. After just four months, LeClerc had lost a third of his soldiers to the disease.

“It is quite impossible for me to remain here for more than six months,” the general wrote to Napoléon Bonaparte. “My health is so wretched that I would consider myself lucky if I could last for that time!”

He didn’t. Nearly six months later, LeClerc contracted yellow fever and died on 22 October 1802. Of the original 20,000 French soldiers – not to mention thousands of reinforcements – only 3,000 returned to France.

A female Aedes aegypti mosquito feeds on a human host in Dr. Grayson Brown’s lab at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. Photo by Matt Barton, ©2016 UK College of Agriculture. Photo used with permission.

At that time, no one knew that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was the vector of the disease. It would take nearly 80 years before someone figured it out, and nearly 100 years before the theory would be proven and accepted by scientists.

Round two: The Panama Canal

In 1880, a French company called La Société Internationale du Canal Interocéanique set out to construct a canal through present-day Panama that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The French had recently completed a similar project, the Suez Canal, so they expected the new venture to be successful as well. However, they soon found out that digging a canal in the dry Egyptian desert was a lot different than doing so in the hot, humid tropics where mosquitoes thrive.

Just as they had done to the French soldiers who were sent to Haiti 80 years earlier, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes made the workers’ lives unbearable – and for many, impossible – by transmitting the yellow fever virus. In addition, the workers had to deal with other mosquitoes that transmitted malaria. By 1889, the year they abandoned the project, it is estimated that 22,000 workers died from mosquito-borne diseases and the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Enter Walter Reed

Anyone who has served in the US military has probably heard of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, but the accomplishments of Major Walter Reed are not as well known. In 1869, Reed became a medical doctor when he was only 17 years old. Over the next three decades he served as a medical officer in the US Army and studied pathology and bacteriology.

Walter Reed. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In June 1900, Reed and some US Army colleagues were sent to Havana, Cuba to investigate the cause of yellow fever. There were many theories at the time. Some believed it was caused by bacterial pathogens, while others believed that blankets or clothing that had been used by yellow fever victims could somehow infect other people who came into contact with these items.

One man, a Cuban doctor named Carlos Juan Finlay, had suspected for nearly two decades that an insect vector was involved, but he was never able to prove it. Dr. Finlay met with Dr. Reed and other members of the US Army Yellow Fever Board and told them about his theory, which they were able to validate through a series of experiments. One of them involved allowing infected mosquitoes to bite volunteers to see if they would contract the disease, which they did. Finally, the relationship between the yellow fever virus and its vector, Aedes aegypti, had been established.

The discovery caused public health officials in Havana to concentrate on mosquito control, which greatly reduced cases of yellow fever, and the same mosquito management procedures were used in Panama a few years later in 1904 when the United States took over the construction of the Panama Canal. If it weren’t for Walter Reed’s experiments and the massive mosquito control efforts in the Canal Zone, the United States probably would have experienced the same disastrous results as their French counterparts.

The effort continues

In 2014 – well before most people had ever heard of Zika or chikungunya – the Entomological Society of America and the Entomological Society of Brazil agreed to host a meeting of international scientists to collaborate on solutions for controlling the Aedes aegypti.

The Summit on the Aedes aegypti Crisis in the Americas will take place on 13 March 2016 in the city of Maceió in Alagoas, Brazil. Representatives from international entomological societies will meet with representatives from the Pan American Health Organization, funding agencies, industry, and key figures from governmental organizations such as the USA’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Preparations to host this important summit on Aedes aegypti began two years ago as a way to address dengue and chikungunya,” said Dr. Grayson C. Brown, past President of ESA and co-chair of the event. “Now that Zika has become an important health crisis, our mission has become even more critical. It is vital that the world’s scientific leaders work together on this issue.”

It’s been more than 100 years since Cuba’s Carlos Juan Finlay met with Walter Reed and his colleagues to determine the cause of yellow fever. Hopefully, this new international collaboration will lead to solutions that could potentially save thousands of human lives.

Featured image credit: The Aedes aegypti mosquito has white markings on its legs and a lyre marking on the upper surface of its thorax. Photo by Matt Barton, UK College of Agriculture, ©2016. Photo used with permission.

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When black holes collide

The discovery of gravitational waves, announced on 11 February 2016 by scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), has made headline news around the world. One UK broadsheet devoted its entire front page to a image of a simulation of two orbiting black holes on which they superimposed the headline “The theory of relativity proved.”

This is of course inaccurate. Scientific theories are never proved (though they can be refuted), and the new results did not really make any significant change to the credibility of Einstein’s theory amongst physicists. If anything, it is the other way around, and the agreement between the details of the signal observed by the LIGO team and Einstein’s predictions lend significant credibility to the new results. After years of searching, the two LIGO interferometers (one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana) have both picked up a remarkable signal that originates from the collision of two black holes.

One UK tabloid relegated the story to page 21 and their headline, “Einstein, Einstein, give us a wave!”, is perhaps closer to the truth. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicts that accelerating mass produces gravitational waves which radiate away at the speed of light, rippling the very fabric of space-time. Gravitational waves are usually very weak and difficult to detect, so you need a really dramatic event to produce a significant source of them.

Two black holes in stable orbit around each other do produce a continuous stream of gravitational waves which gets stronger as the black holes get closer to each other, but even these are too weak to detect. However, when they get really close, and start to spiral into each other, the orbits become faster and faster, the acceleration increases and, as they dramatically plunge headlong into collision a ‘chirp’ of intense gravitational waves are emitted. This is exactly what was detected on 14 September 2015 and, using Einstein’s theories, it has been possible to deduce that the chirp originated from the collision, 1.3 billion light-years away, of two black holes one having a mass 36 times that our of Sun and the other of 29 solar masses. These two black holes merged to form a spinning, 62-solar-mass black hole (the difference in mass between 62 and 36+29 being converted into energy and radiated away in the form of gravitational waves).

Thus the real significance of the LIGO results, quite apart from the wonderful discovery of gravitational waves (long expected by physicists), is that this is the first time we have been able to watch two black holes collide and merge. Almost all our information in astronomy comes from photons. We routinely study the visible light, x-rays, infrared and radio waves emitted by the objects in the Universe. But now we have a new type of observatory, the gravitational wave observatory that is uniquely sensitive to very dramatic events that results in the emission of gravitons; and now we know they work!

Featured image credit: Best-Ever Snapshot of a Black Hole’s Jets by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. 

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Demarcating sovereignty: a history of Dutch-Belgian land swaps

In early November 2015, the Belgian and Dutch press announced that a small land swap was in the making between Belgium and the Netherlands. Agreement has been reached at the local level that Belgium would cede a small peninsula in the river Maas [Meuse] of about 14 hectares – the size of 28 soccer fields – to the Netherlands. In return, Belgium would get a smaller piece of Dutch territory where it had already built a water lock. The swap makes sense because the first plot of land had become unreachable over land from Belgium following the straightening of the river Maas over a stretch of four kilometres during the 1960s. As this makes it difficult for the Belgian police to patrol there, it has become a safe-haven for drug dealers. In late December the story hit the international press as another nice fait divers to end the year on.

The story is indeed peculiar. Border swaps (including those between Belgium and the Netherlands) have become a rarity and the term has the ring of the remote past. If the agreement materialises at the national level and is implemented, it will be the first border correction between the two countries since the early days of Belgium’s independence from the Netherlands.

The delineation and demarcation of precise border lines only became a concern as a consequence of the rise of the modern sovereign State in Europe from the 17th century onwards. Before this time, the borders between realms were neither clearly established nor marked. In many instances, vaguely defined border land existed. Also, different jurisdictions (e.g., fiscal, judicial, and ecclesiastical) would not necessarily overlap so that the judicial border could vary from the fiscal one, and some entities – such as those of a bishopric or feudal fief – would straddle the border of two countries.

The modern sovereign State with its claim of exclusive jurisdiction over its territory in all public matters changed this. European princes and governments of the late 17th to 19th centuries were much concerned if not obsessed with achieving legally impenetrable as well as clearly marked border lines that would unequivocally define the extent of their jurisdiction in all issues. This meant that judicial, fiscal, ecclesiastical, local, and feudal entities were as much as possible adapted to fit the borders of the state and that numerous border agreements were negotiated and implemented to swap enclaves and draw clear lines. Such border conventions were often layered, in the sense that more detailed agreements followed upon general treaties. Whereas the general treaties would determine land swaps and define the border in more general terms, later conventions were necessary to work the agreement out in more detail on the map and then mark the borders in the field.

The history of the Belgian-Dutch border is illustrative of what occurred in many parts of Europe, and later outside Europe. The roots of the border go back to the Eighty Years’ War (1567–1648), which ended with the independence of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces from Spain by the Peace of Münster of 30 January 1648 (1 CTS 1). Article 3 of the Münster treaty fixed the border on the basis of the military status quo. This left much uncertainty as to the exact delineation of the border. The Münster Treaty applied the common principle which said that all lands and villages went with the town or local authority on which they depended, opening a Pandora’s box of claims and counterclaims. Problems arose over the whole stretch of the border from west to east. The military status quo meant that the two major provinces of the Netherlands, the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant, were split, implying that it was the territorial extent of regional and local authorities that became the yardstick for establishing the new ‘national’ borders. This was a recipe for enclaves, overlapping claims, and constant bickering. On 20 September 1664, Spain and the Netherlands reached an agreement to fix the border in somewhat more detail in the Treaty of The Hague (8 CTS 187). To the east of Brabant, in the zone where the Bishopric of Liège and the duchies of Limburg and Gelre [Guelders] clashed with each other and with several smaller fiefs, the situation was and would remain more fluid and complex. With the Barrier Treaty of Antwerp of 15 November 1715 (29 CTS 333), part of Gelre was ceded to Prussia by the then-Austrian rulers of the Southern Netherlands, adding a third major contender to the imbroglio.

The short-lived United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815–1830) formed the context for some land swaps between provinces and local authorities that dealt with some communal enclaves. Previously, attempts to resolve the complex situation in the east had already begun under French rule (1806–1813). After Belgium reached its independence from the Netherlands through its secession in 1830 and the Dutch recognition thereof in the treaty of London of 19 April 1839 (see especially 88 CTS 427), new problems arose. Through the treaty, Belgium lost half of the province of Limburg and retained only the larger part of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, ruled by the Dutch King William I (1813–1840). This left the need to delineate and demarcate the new Belgian borders with Luxemburg as well at the Netherlands. The latter was done through the Treaty of The Hague of 5 November 1842 (94 CTS 37) and the Convention of Maastricht of 8 August 1843 (95 CTS 223). The Hague Treaty fixed the border in more general terms and included several land swaps. The Maastricht Convention included more exchanges and delineated the boundary with detailed descriptions and maps on a 1/10,000 or, where necessary, 1/2,500 scale. Subsequently, 365 border posts were erected to indicate the border.

The 1842–1843 boundary treaties were the final general exercise between the Northern and Southern Netherlands to deal with the inheritance of a complex, contentious, and bloody past and achieve the aim of a clearly defined, manageable, and defensible national territory. They left one peculiarity. The village of Baarle finds itself surrounded by Dutch territory. However, it is not completely Dutch as the village is home to two municipalities, the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau and the Belgian municipality of Baarle-Hertog. Both municipalities consist of different patches of land whereby some streets and even houses straddle the national border. This situation is a remnant of the feudal age. In the Late Middle Ages, the dukes of Brabant ceded part of the village as a feudal fief to the barons of Breda, while retaining other parts for themselves. Later, they turned over these latter parts to the Land of Turnhout. When the Münster Treaty fixed the military status quo in 1648, Breda went to the Republic while Turnhout remained with the Spanish Netherlands. The respective possessions of both fiefs in Baarle went along. Several subsequent negotiations could not straighten out this anomaly. Today, Baarle is famous as a tourist attraction and any change in its situation is happily considered by most to be completely unnecessary.





Image credit: River Maas. Photo by Hans Hagenaars. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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What does your mother language mean to you?

In 1999, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) created International Mother Language Day, which is celebrated each year on 21 February. Of course, we couldn’t let this date go by without marking the occasion on our Northern Sotho and isiZulu Living Dictionaries. This year, we asked people from a variety of mother tongues to let us know what their native language means to them, and this is what they had to say.

It is the most beautiful treasure in my life, because it defines who I am. The way Northern Sotho sounds when I speak is out of this world and unique, ‘wa kwešiša’ (do you understand). The Living Dictionary is benefiting this language because in our country, prior to democracy, it was maginalised and its growth is very slow. Most of the dialects of the Northern Sotho Language are not incorporated in the standardised language and therefore, are facing extinction. The Living Dictionary is their silent voice.

–Matlakala Kganyago, Northern Sotho Language Manager

My mother tongue Afrikaans has, through no fault of its own, carried the guilt of association with Apartheid. And yet it is a language of great beauty and diversity, rooted in a merry mixture of Dutch and Malay culture, but richly influenced by South Africa’s other indigenous languages. It is also one of the few languages in Africa that serves as a language of instruction up to tertiary education level, and has a rich tradition of scientific and literary development. For many rural South Africans, though, it is a bread-and-butter language, their primary language of access to commerce—black Afrikaans mother tongue speakers outnumber white Afrikaners. One also sees this diverse, delicious gallimaufry in the words Afrikaans has contributed to SA English; for example, from foods such as biltong and bobotie (curried minced meat baked with a savoury custard topping) to descriptive words such as loskop (absent-minded or careless) and gatvol (extremely fed up or disgusted). I think that a Living Dictionary could be the perfect platform to bring a diverse community of language users together to share words from their different dialects, discuss Afrikaans language issues and help Afrikaans to keep up with a world in which technology (and related vocabulary) is ever-changing.

–Phillip Louw, Manager: Dictionary Content Development and Technical, OUP Southern Africa

Every time I go on holiday, I’m reminded how lucky I am to be a native English speaker. Whilst I do always try to learn a smattering of the local language, there’s no denying that being able to turn up somewhere and know that somebody will be able to talk to you is very convenient. However the thing I love about English is its flexibility and readiness to embrace new things. There’s no English Academy which means that the language is controlled not by stuffy professors in ivory towers, but by speakers on the street—often the most marginalised ones as well. Immigrant communities give us English names for their food and traditions, teen girls teach us how to describe trends in eyebrow growth, black communities teach us to twerk. Often these communities are overlooked or ignored in cultural dialogue, but the English language accepts and embraces all of them. The Living Dictionary is the ideal way for these innovations in English to be captured so that we can all benefit from the creativity that goes into them.

–Rachel Blainey, Content and Partnerships Manager, OUP

It has been many years since I left the Philippines and English replaced Filipino as my main medium of communication, but this has only made my native language even more meaningful to me. Whereas before I used to take it for granted, now I relish every opportunity of using it. Its words lend greater significance to every utterance: jokes are funnier, songs more beautiful, stories more engaging, when expressed in my mother tongue. I love the diversity and openness of Filipino—an Austronesian language with a largely Malay word stock enriched by foreign influences as varied as Spanish, English, Sanskrit, and Chinese. I love how it can invest so much meaning just with the addition or repetition of a syllable or two: “Anong sinasabi mo?” and “Anong pinagsasabi mo?” can both be translated to “What are you saying?” but a Filipino speaker knows there is a world of difference between one phrase and the other. In Filipino, “Bababa ba?” is a perfectly grammatical, understandable, everyday sentence. Some people see this as a sign of the crudeness of the language, but I disagree. A language with so much history, that can convey so much with so little, can only be described as fascinating, and will be a very interesting addition to Oxford Global Languages.

–Danica Salazar, Oxford English Dictionary General Editing, OUP

My native language is Russian. For me it is a connection to Russia’s rich culture and history which is so deeply rooted in the language that I sometimes use certain words and expressions going way back without even realizing their etymology. It is my identity and what shapes my mentality. Russian is the language I use to think, dream and feel emotions, my inner voice. Here I can’t but agree with Nelson Mandela who said “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” Probably only in Russian can one say: “да нет, наверное,” which translated literally means “yes no probably” or “well, no probably”—a phrase which is at the same time affirmative, negative and bearing uncertainty.

–Anna Gell, Publicity Administrator, OUP

isiZulu means everything to me because it defines who I am where I come from as a person, that is, it expresses who I am as an individual. It also influences my culture and even my thoughts processes. It is special because it is very reach with fixed expressions, idioms and proverbs and the fact that it is a tonal language, that is, the word with the same form can have two different meanings because of how it sounds and there are words or fixed expressions that are uniquely isiZulu because they cannot be translated into English, for example, the word ‘umkhehlo’ which is a traditional wedding-related word. The Living Dictionary can benefit isiZulu in many ways one of which would be to develop it to become one of the languages of the world instead of it being a regional language. In this way it will change and improve people’s lives and change the way people look at isiZulu and, in turn, benefit other African languages as well that are not included in OGL in that they (other African languages) can learn and simulate what isiZulu is doing.

–Sibusiso Dlamini, isiZulu Language Manager

Portuguese was the language I grew up with. Most of my memories have Portuguese words in them: the way my parents would wake me up when I was little, my friends’ chat at school, my husband’s vows at our wedding… Now that I live in the UK, I feel saudade of Brazil and my mother tongue. One might say that “I miss my country and its national language” but it sounds much more poetic when I use the unique word from Portuguese—saudade—to express the feeling. I believe the Living Dictionary can benefit Portuguese by enabling people from different regions in Brazil and in other Portuguese-speaking countries to compile their local vocabulary. This vocabulary can change very dynamically so it is interesting that the community can contribute to the dictionary by adding new content in an also dynamic way.

–Fabiana de Freitas, Oxford Global Languages Coordinator

My mother-tongue is German, and it gives me confidence and makes me feel secure in new or strange surroundings. However, having been exposed to isiZulu from birth, I regard this fascinating language as my second mother language. isiZulu has some very special characteristics that do not occur in German. There is a unique way of expressing manner or colour, or imitating the sound of certain actions in Zulu. Such expressions, rich in meaning, cannot be directly translated in German or English for that matter. Examples are: nka (of staring with mouth open); klebu (of pure redness) and ngqongqongqo (of knocking, as on a door). The Living Dictionary can benefit all languages by sharing expressions that are unique to each and everyone of them. In the case of isiZulu, users could be encouraged to contribute and share the ideophone expressions they know and use regularly. One could even start a crowd sourcing contest to see who can contribute the most ideophones.

–Sonja Bosch

I speak a language that originates deep in the Russian Taiga, and whose relatives are Estonian, Hungarian, Mari and Komi. No wonder it sounds suspicious to the European ear. Finnish has a love affair with vowels (hääyöaie is the most famous example), long compounds (määräenemmistöpäätöksentekojärjestelmä is an actual word) and affixes. We like efficiency: why waste multiple words on saying “I did fall in love” when just one, “rakastuinpas”, will do? No need to distinguish between gender in Finnish: everyone’s a simple hän. Speaking Finnish is the joy of rolling vigorous r’s, using proverbs such as “’Etiäppäin’, sanoi mummo lumessa” (“’Onward,’ said the granny in snow), and speaking one’s mind abroad without fear of anyone understanding you. I see the greatest benefit of a Finnish Living Dictionary as giving all Finnish speakers an opportunity to record their language in all its vibrancy. I’ve used English on a daily basis for years now, and it doesn’t feel foreign to me anymore. But I doubt it can ever feel like my language in the way the poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937-1983) describes: “The Finnish language is my window and my house. I live in this language, it is my skin.”

–Hanna Heiskanen, Commissioning Assistant, OUP

My mother tongue is Portuguese, and it is an important part of my cultural identity. I now think mostly in English, and this is probably the language in which I can express myself better. There are, however, some basic and deeply-engrained things which don’t change: I still count in Portuguese, for instance. As with every language, there are expressions unique to it. Ironically, one that would be very useful here in the UK has no exact equivalent in English: ‘friorento’ meaning ‘someone who is always cold’! Echoing the words of fellow Brazilian Fabiana, a Portuguese Living Dictionary would allow regional variations and local vocabulary, of which Brazil is very rich, to be captured and preserved before they disappear in favour of the standard Portuguese you hear on TV.

–Simone Bichara, Oxford Global Languages Community Manager

A version of this blog post originally appeared on our Northern Sotho and isiZulu Living Dictionaries.

Image Credit: “International Mother Language Day Celebration, February 21, 2015 in Dhaka” by Aminul Islam Sajib. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Why we need “mystery shoppers” directly observing health care

Considering the well documented problems of medical error, it’s remarkable that it’s rarely observed. Of course there is much scrutiny of the data that is generated during the health care encounter, but that is not the same thing. For instance, while quality measures track data on how well blood pressure is managed, there are not measures of whether blood pressure is actually measured accurately. To know if it’s measured correctly, you’d have to be there, know what to look for, and see if it’s taken correctly. If the blood pressure cuff is the wrong size, or the patient has not been resting for at least 3 minutes, or their arm is not at the level of their heart and their feet on the ground, the measurement upon which everything else is based may not be accurate. This is true for much of the data upon which we rely when assessing quality. Unfortunately, the evidence is that a good deal of what is recorded in the medical record is inaccurate.

How is this known? Through undercover direct observation of care: A relatively small number of researchers have trained actors to present as real patients, tell a narrative that will prompt certain questions and tests, and then observe what happens next – a kind of “mystery shopper” who knows what to look for in the health care setting. The technical term for these individuals is “unannounced standardized patient” (USP) because they adhere to a script, allowing comparison of how different doctors manage the same patient. Such studies are eye opening: At a top tier medical center 33% of physical exam maneuvers recorded in the medical record were never conducted. Conversely about 16% of preventive care services rendered are not documented. In one study, a USP showed up at many primary care doctors’ offices saying she was going to be working as a life guard and needed a pre-work physical. The actor was an 18 year old fair skinned woman. One third of the doctors provided no skin protective counselling, not even recommendations to use a sunscreen. An audit of the medical record, however, showed perfectly well conducted new patient visits, regardless of whether the patient was counselled about how to prevent sun burns. There are many such published examples.

Given the plethora of evidence that much is not well (besides the patient) behind the closed door to an exam room, why is no one doing anything about it? After all, “mystery shoppers” are widely used in retail, including hotels, restaurants, and shopping centers to assess the performance of employers. Aren’t sick people at least as important as folks looking for a place to eat or spend the night?

Image Credit: Doctor recording notes on patient chart by Wesley Wilson. CC0 via Pexels.

There are several reasons: First, it’s more complex to send an uncover observer of care (i.e. a USP) into a health care setting undetected than it is to send a secret shopper into a mall. We’ve sent hundreds, though, in many practice settings, so it’s doable. Others have as well and detection rates are in the range of 10-15%. USPs makes it possible to collect authentic data on how care is actually delivered with no “Hawthorne Effect.” Such an approach has yielded the remarkable findings noted above, illustrating the chasm between what we think patients are getting and what care really looks like.

Second, among those who know about USPs, there is skepticism that the method could ever be scalable. Given the thousands of clinical settings around the country, how could one possibly deploy fake patients to all of them on a regular basis? To answer that question one would need to know how much money could be saved by correcting all these hidden deficits in care, and whether better outcomes for patients brought additional value. If the hospitality industry thinks it’s worth the expense, the health care industry might arrive at a similar conclusion.

Finally, the third reason USPs are underemployed is that they are scary. Who wants to endorse being spied on? In fact, a few years ago the American Medical Association tabled a recommendation by its own ethics committee to endorse the use of “secret shopper” patients in health care. The way to solve this problem, though, is to make the process safe. This is done by treating it like “peer review,” in which doctors receive feedback on their performance but that data cannot be used for disciplinary purposes or to cut pay. And the data cannot be subpoenaed.

Those of us who work with USPs to directly observe care often feel like we have not only a secret shopper but also a secret weapon to addressing much of what ails health care. What will it take for USPs to become as common in health care as they are in retail? It may require a combination of consumer and payer expectation. Anyone who has been or will be a patient needs to demand that quality assessment reaches into the exam room, so that they can be sure that the care they are receiving is in fact quality care. Payers, such as Medicare or Blue Cross Blue Shield, will need to insist that if they are paying for that diabetic foot exam, they need to know that the doctor didn’t just document they did one, but that they actually did do one and did it correctly (it turns out that this is not always the case more than 50% of the time).

It’s human nature to focus attention on what is assessed. Right now we are measuring how well doctors and other health care providers document what they do, rather than what they actually do. The result is a medical record that gets the best of care, and patients who often get a lower quality of service than the medical record indicates. Isn’t it time to pay as much attention to the patients as their charts?

Featured image credit: Stethoscope by Wesley Wilson. CC0 via Pexels.

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Brexit and the fear of immigrants

Brexit—the prospect of Britain exiting the European Union—has garnered a great deal of attention in the past year as Britons debate the pros and cons of remaining a member of the EU.  So-called Eurosceptics oppose integration with Europe for a variety of reasons, among them the constraints it places on the UK’s ability to negotiate more advantageous trade agreements, and the regulations and bureaucratic excesses the EU imposes on Britain in economic, financial, and judicial matters.  By far the greatest grievance against EU membership, however, concerns its requirement to keep borders open, a policy that Eurosceptics regard as the cause of widespread immigration to the UK from Eastern Europe.   Many of these migrants are Muslim, as are the thousands upon thousands of refugees now pouring into Europe from Syria and North Africa.

The immigration of peoples from the member states of the European Union, and now from the turmoil in the Middle East, has provoked a political backlash from certain elements of the British population. Extreme right-wing parties such as the British National Party (BNP) have thrived in certain constituencies since the 1970s.  The BNP’s frankly neo-fascist pronouncements alienated many people and have given way to more reasonable-sounding groups such as the English Defense League (EDL), Britain First, and the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP).  These groups downplay the racial and ethnic composition of the people they wish to exclude from society and focus instead on what they call threats to “Britishness,” particularly Islam.  Britain First, for example, which appeared in 2011 as an offshoot of the BNP, claims on its homepage that it is “not against individual Muslims, but specifically against the doctrine and religion of Islam itself as an ideology.” The English Defence League, founded in 2009, describes itself as “a human rights organization that exists to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.”

This kind of rhetoric against those deemed alien and “un-British” is not new.  The fears and anxieties generated by the presence of Muslims in Britain recall an earlier moment in British history when immigrants from India, Pakistan, and the colonies of Africa and the Caribbean began to enter Britain in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s.  For a significant portion of the British public, the presence of people of color created distress, which was articulated as the loss of a British “way of life” consequent upon the loss of empire and the immigration of former colonial subjects to their country.  In 1968, Enoch Powell, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, had declared the settlement of blacks in Britain to be a threat to the nation’s very existence.  In his so-called “River of Blood” speech, he foresaw, “like the Roman,. . . ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood,’” if immigration was not banned outright and the “re-emigration” of former colonial subjects back to their countries of origin not put into effect.  Powell conveyed the ominous message that if blacks—a term that included Asians and Arabs as well as Africans and West Indians–in Britain were given the same freedoms from discrimination that white Britons enjoyed, then those very freedoms and the British way of life they represented would be destroyed in a traumatic blood-letting.

By the 1970s, what had once been the racist rantings of a fringe politician became core beliefs held by many Britons and manifested themselves in the ideology of the New Right.  Its grassroots support would derive from Britons who saw in the immigration of large numbers of people of color from former colonies a threat to the life they had known. For many conservatives, people of color represented the forces responsible for Britain’s decline, for the social instability brought on by unemployment and recession.  “The nation has been and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by implantation of unassimilated and unassimilable populations. . . . alien wedges in the heartland of the state,” asserted Powell in 1976.  By this time, his message of racial intolerance and of black people as the source of danger to British society had been embraced by a significant portion of Britons and would soon help to produce the electoral victory of the Conservative party, with Margaret Thatcher at its head.  As Alfred Sherman, a prominent right-wing theorist, put it in September 1979, on the eve of Thatcher’s election as prime minister, “the imposition of mass immigration from backward alien cultures is just one symptom of this self-destructive urge reflected in the assault on patriotism, the family–both as a conjugal and economic unit–the Christian religion in public life and schools, traditional morality, in matters of sex, honesty, public display, and respect for the law–in short, all that is English and wholesome.”

The fact that Britain has been here before does not alter the gravity of the consequences of the UK leaving the European Union.  Conservatives, for example, who campaigned on the promise to do away with the EU’s Human Rights Act and replace it with a British bill of rights, appear to have accepted the reality that abolishing the EU measure will be not only difficult but will carry significant repercussions.  The Northern Ireland peace agreement, to name but one instance, is predicated on the acceptance of the Human Rights Act, and doing away with it might open the door to an unraveling of other elements of the accord.  Scotland, much of Wales, and Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland strongly support EU membership; should English voters choose to leave the EU, the constitutional showdown would have serious consequences for the UK.  And should Britain leave the EU altogether—which a significant element within the Conservative party, including its leader, David Cameron, opposes—it’s hard to see how effective the UK would be in influencing the decisions taken in Europe or in any other part of the world.  A retreat to a kind of “little Englandism” reminiscent of Gladstone would not serve British international interests well.

Image credit: “Westminster, London” by Berit Watkin, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Let the people speak: history with voices

For 135 years the Dictionary of National Biography has been the national record of noteworthy men and women who’ve shaped the British past. Today’s Dictionary retains many attributes of its Victorian predecessor, not least a focus on concise and balanced accounts of individuals from all walks of national history. But there have also been changes in how these life stories are encapsulated and conveyed.

In its Victorian incarnation (and twentieth-century supplements), the Dictionary presented each life as a double-column printed text. 2004 saw the publication of the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) and with it the addition of portrait images.Today, the Dictionary includes portraits of 11,500 of its 60,000 subjects in a wide range of media and painterly styles. Common to each image—be it a Holbein in chalk or an Epstein bust—is its depiction of the sitter from life, so as to convey an aspect of his or her personality.

Now the Oxford DNB is moving on—this time with the inclusion of sound—in a project to link biographies to voice recordings made by an initial selection of 750 historical individuals. The earliest clips—including the suffrage campaigner Christabel Pankhurst (from 1908) and the Liberal prime minister, Herbert Asquith (1909)—are held in the ‘Early Spoken Word’ archive at the British Library.

As the crackling on these wax cylinders makes clear, this was a pioneering form of communication reserved for moments of political drama. Speaking in December 1908, Christabel Pankhurst issued a rallying call to every ‘patriotic and public spirited woman’ to take up ‘militant’ tactics in the hope that ‘1909 must, and shall, see the political enfranchisement of women.’ It’s not hard to imagine the enthusiasm or alarm that would have greeted such words, especially when disseminated by a new technology. In his speech on the 1909 ‘people’s budget’ Herbert Asquith likewise acknowledged the intersection of technological novelty and looming political crisis: ‘I have gladly accepted this invitation to speak to you in this unusual manner’, begins the prime minister, ‘to reach as many of my fellow countrymen as possible.’

Two decades later the availability of ‘wireless’—and the ability to speak directly to people in real time—instilled a new pioneering spirit. It’s one well captured in George V’s opening words to the first Christmas message of 1932: ‘Through one of the marvels of modern science, I am enabled … to speak to all my people throughout the Empire.’ Other British Library clips reveal how voice recordings (as distinct from live broadcast) took on new formats in the 1930s. Many are early examples of now familiar genres: the celebrity interview with Arthur Conan Doyle; the personal documentary by aviator Amy Johnson; and chef Marcel Boulestin’s guide to the perfect omelette (‘practice, quickness, a thick iron pan, and a good fire’).

In addition to these early British Library recordings, 500 ODNB biographies are now linked to that person’s appearance on the popular BBC radio series, Desert Island Discs. The programme—in which a ‘castaway’ discusses his or her life and ability to survive on the island—was devised by Roy Plomley and first broadcast in January 1942. Very few early episodes remain while many from the 1950s (such as that for Alfred Hitchcock, in 1959) are only partially extant. The majority of ODNB links are therefore to episodes from the 1960s to 2010—our most recent castaway being the hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon, whose biography was added to the Dictionary earlier this year.

Oxford DNB biographies and episodes of Desert Island Discs have much in common—both offering chronological, narrative accounts of a life. But now available side-by-side, it’s the differences in format that make for a fuller understanding of their subject. As a conversation, the radio interview is intimate, immediate, and selective. As a third-person narrative, an ODNB biography is more dispassionate, reflective, and rounded but can sometimes miss the colour of a personal anecdote or aside. Then there’s a castaway’s accompanying choices—eight favourite discs, book, and a luxury. Does the fact that the musicians Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Moura Lympany chose eight of their own recordings offer insight into their personalities? Should the choice of 15 castaways to take the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’ as their book be seen as anything other than good judgement?

For many biographers the appearance of his or her subject on Desert Island Discs is also an important source. But the value of linking the Dictionary to the BBC archive also derives from more casual references. The ODNB entry for Tom Denning, for instance, mentions that this eminent judge never lost his ‘distinctive Hampshire burr’. On his appearance on Desert Island Discs (1980)  there’s the voice, and the Hampshire accent, in Denning’s 81st year.

This ability to catch a person’s accent, and to hear a person speak, is the principal attraction of linking ODNB biographies to sound recordings. Like nothing else, the voice reminds us that a distant historical figure was a living person as well as the subject of a biographical text. Listening to voices recorded more than a centenary ago conjures up something of the ‘marvels’, and delight, that George V alluded to on Christmas Day 1932—one voice traversing an empire, another the century.

The effect is particularly striking in ODNB’s earliest link to the British Library sound archive— that for Florence Nightingale who spoke in support of the Light Brigade Relief Fund in July 1890. Barely audible over the hiss, she concludes her short, carefully enunciated message: ‘When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale.’

Featured image credit: King George V making his annual Christmas Broadcast to the nation by Andy Dingley. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays and poems

In Shakespeare’s comedies, sex is not only connected to marriage, but postdates it. Prospero in The Tempest insists to his prospective son-in-law that he not break the “virgin-knot” of his intended bride, Miranda, “before / All sanctimonious ceremonies may  / With full and holy rite be ministered,” lest “barren hate, / Sour-eyed disdain, and discord . . . bestrew / The union of your bed with weeds so loathly / That you shall hate it both” (4.1.15-22). Ferdinand and Miranda fervently agree, despite the fact that they are on a far-away island where dallying might seem to be safe from prying eyes.

Couples in the early romantic comedies are similarly disposed toward chaste conduct until they are married. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the two romantic couples, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, are found sleeping together on the ground after their night of adventure in the Forest of Arden, in a configuration so suggestively erotic that Duke Theseus, happening upon them during his morning hunt, jests, “Saint Valentine is past. / Begin these woodbirds but to couple now?” (4.1.138-9), but we know as audience they have been placed where they are by Puck’s magical control and are not even aware with whom they are lying. And so it is with Bassanio and Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Orlando and Rosalind in As You Like It, Orsino and Viola in Twelfth Night, and still others. Alfred Harbage argues in his As They Liked It (1947) that Shakespeare is acquiescing to the moral code of his popular London audiences. Not infrequently, he bowdlerizes his sources in this regard. In the source story for Twelfth Night, for instance, Silvio (the equivalent of Sebastian) impregnates Julina (Countess Olivia), leaving her and Silla (Viola) in a seemingly impossible quandary when it seems that Julina’s lover and the presumed father of the expected child is actually a woman. Shakespeare leaves out the pregnancy.

This is not to say, however, that romantic love proceeds smoothly among the young and well-behaved lovers in Shakespeare’s early comedies. As Lysander wisely observes in Midsummer, “The course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.134). It is plagued, as Lysander explains, by discrepancies in hereditary rank or age, or enmities between families, or inflexible parental authority, or “War, death, and sickness” (135-42). These unfriendly hurdles are no less apparent in Romeo and Juliet, an early tragedy attuned to the vexations of the early romantic comedies.

Claudio, deceived by Don John, accuses Hero by Marcus C. Stone, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

An even more difficult hazard is the male psyche, which, as Shakespeare sees it, stands in serious need of assistance and repair. Petruchio, to be sure, in The Taming of the Shrew, flamboyantly embodies what appears to be a success story of masculine confidence in the dating game, but to such a degree that his triumph strikes many readers and audiences, especially today, as grotesque. Benedick, in Much Ado, is more ready to trade his machismo for a sincere attempt to learn truer ways of courtship from Beatrice. Elsewhere, young males in the comedies are apt to be clueless, uncertain, far less mature than the young ladies whom they woo. The four young men in Love’s Labor’s Lost are tricked by the clever young women into perjuring themselves unintentionally, whereupon the men must wait out a whole year of penitence before approaching their young woman again. Young women in these plays generally know who they are and where they are going, emotionally and practically. They need to instruct their male wooers in the art of courtship, impressing on them most of all the necessity of weaning themselves from romantic fantasies. The women insist they are women, not goddesses, capable of being waspish and moody at times, not to be won merely by sonnet writing and romantic flimflam. Rosalind is like that in As You Like It. She will have nothing to do with men who ”are April when the woo, December when they wed” (4.1.140-1). In her disguise as Ganymede, she hopes to cure Orlando of his clichés about dying for love and all that sort of romantic nonsense. Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is of a similar mind. She urges Romeo not to “swear by the moon, th’inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circles orb” (2.2.109-10). She is the one who insists that they talk about insistent practical problems like marriage in the face of parental opposition. She forswears overraught metaphors for the simplicity of “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (33).

Beneath this upbeat vision of young love as healthily capable of emotional maturity, the darker spectre of jealous fear is never very far away. Claudio’s overly susceptible readiness in Much Ado to believe that Hero is capable of Don John’s malicious and unfounded accusations of infidelity leads to a nearly tragic conclusion. Men’s perverse inclination to suspect womanly infidelity is grounded in the men’s own fears that they are unlovable and that, conversely, women are inherently inclined toward choosing new partners in a way that threatens to emasculate the self-pitying male caught in a fantasy of betrayal. These are the fears that will ripen in Shakespeare’s later years into full-blown tragedy, in Troilus’s being deserted by Cressida (for compelling reasons), or Hamlet’s misogynistic obsession with the infidelities he sees in his mother and in Ophelia, or Othello’s fearful suspicions of Desdemona, or Macbeth’s falling under the baleful influence of his wife and the Weird Sisters. Controlling and betraying women are not unknown in Shakespeare’s earlier plays, to be sure, especially the history plays, where we encounter Joan of Arc and Margaret of Anjou, but unnerving portrayals like these are more visibly present in the later plays, as in Volumnia’s emasculating defeat of her son in Coriolanus and in Leontes’s paranoid accusations against his virtuous wife Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.

The absence of a wife for Prospero in The Tempest leaves us wondering what use Shakespeare is making of this motif in the years of his retirement to Stratford and a renewed habitation with his wife Anne whom he had left there when he moved to London for the bulk of his career. Does the enduring love of a father for his daughter in The Tempest appear to be a substitute for the marriage in Shakespeare’s own life that had begun with a premarital pregnancy and all that may have followed as a consequence of that unplanned complication? Who knows?

Whether homosexual attraction plays a large part in Shakespeare’s depiction of sexuality is a much-debated topic. Certainly the delightful business of young male actors playing the roles of women who then disguise themselves as men, sometimes adopting names like Ganymede, allows for erotic suggestion. Acting companies today generally see Antonio in Twelfth Night as sexually attracted to Sebastian, as when Antonio pleads to be allowed to accompany Sebastian in Illyria whatever dangers may accrue: “If you will not murder me for my love, let me be your servant,” Antonio insists (2.1.33-4). Another Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, is quite often portrayed as amorously attached to Bassanio, as in Jeremy Iron’s realization of the role in Michael Radford’s generally excellent film of 2004. Joseph Pequigney’s Such Is My Love (1955) argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets describe a consummated homoerotic relationship. More cautious views see an undeniably strong expression of needful and at times troubling emotional bonding between the presumably male author and his aristocratic friend, while noting at the same time that the fiction of the sonnets, even if it is to be taken as partly autobiographical, does end in a narrative of the poet-speaker’s bitter disappointment at having been betrayed by his “dark lady” mistress and the aristocratic friend. Men in the Early Modern period spoke not uncommonly of their “love” for other males in ways that need not imply erotic entanglement.

Featured image credit: Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Edwin Landseer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Four (mostly) forgotten figures from eighteenth-century France

While the French revolutionary era is a period of the past, it remains one of the most defining moments in the country’s legacy and history. The major victors and vices are well known in these moments of violence and change—but what about the forgotten? From radical cleric Henri Grégoire to military leader Armand-Louis de Gontaut, David A. Bell, author of Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present, explores the overlooked figures of the French Revolution.

Claudine Guérin de Tencin (1682-1749)

Her father, a stern magistrate in the city of Grenoble, intended for her a life as a nun. She had no choice but to agree, but before taking her vows secretly drew up a legal affidavit stating that she was doing so against her will. In 1712, after her father’s death, she used the affidavit to sue successfully for release from the convent. She then moved to Paris, where she became known as the hostess of one of the great intellectual salons of the early eighteenth century. Montesquieu, Fontenelle, Marivaux, and Bolingbroke were among those who attended, and read their works to her guests. She also had romantic liaisons with many of the most powerful men in France, including the foreign minister and the Maréchal de Richelieu. She used her political influence to advance the career of her brother Pierre-Paul in the church, and did it so well that he ended up a cardinal. She became pregnant by one of her lovers, the Chevalier Destouches, and had an illegitimate son in 1717. She left him on the steps of the Church of Saint-Jean-le-Rond in Paris, but she and Destouches arranged for him to be raised by artisans and given a good education. The son, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, grew up to become one of the leading philosophes of the French Enlightenment, a noted mathematician and co-editor, with Denis Diderot, of the Encyclopédie.

“Church of Saint Medard” by Guillaume Speurt. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

François de Pâris (1690-1727)

The son of a wealthy Parisian magistrate, François de Pâris defied his father, who wanted a legal career for him, and instead entered a Catholic seminary. He was fervently attracted to the austere and persecuted current of Catholic thought called Jansenism, which emphasized mankind’s utter depravity. Becoming a deacon, he lived in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Paris, gave most of his money to the poor, wore a hairshirt, and practiced self-flagellation, even weaving iron wires into his clothing and whipping himself until he bled. He died at age thirty-six, and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Médard on the Left Bank. Very soon, visitors to his gravesite claimed that they had been miraculously cured of diseases. Others experienced “convulsions,” had visions, and began to speak in tongues. Thousands thronged to the grave, and seemed to form the basis of a popular movement in favor of Jansenism. Finally, in 1732, King Louis XV ordered the graveyard closed. An unknown wit posted this piece of graffiti on the gate: “Par ordre du Roi, defense à Dieu / De faire miracles en ce lieu” (“By order of the King, God is forbidden to make miracles here”). But the so-called “convulsionary” movement continued in secret and inspired political radicalism, even in the midst of the century of Enlightenment.

Armand-Louis de Gontaut, duke of Lauzun and Biron (1747-1793)

Born into one of the wealthiest aristocratic families in France, the “beau Lauzun” grew up at the French court in Versailles. Known for his splendid appearance and superb manners, he became one of the great rakes and seducers of the century, squandering most of his fortune. Rumors linked him to Queen Marie-Antoinette. He had a successful military career, fighting in Corsica in 1768 (although dashing away from the battlefield to rendezvous with a mistress), and then leading the force that conquered Senegal for France in 1779. Soon afterwards, he raised a legion of his own and served with the French forces in the American Revolution, taking part in the Battle of Yorktown; he appears in Trumbull’s famous painting of Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington. At the start of the French Revolution, he served as a moderate deputy in the National Assembly, and then went back into the army to fight the Austrians. Remaining loyal to the Revolution even after the execution of King Louis XVI, he took to the field against counter-revolutionary Catholic rebels in the Vendée, but tried to limit atrocities against the civilian population. Denounced by ultra-radicals for this moderation, he was recalled to Paris, imprisoned, and sentenced to the guillotine. A day before his execution, he wrote to his father: “Tomorrow, I will die.”

Henri Grégoire (1750-1831)

The son of a tailor from Lorraine, Grégoire became a parish priest, but had intellectual ambitions. In 1788, he gained national fame for a prize-winning essay that argued for the bestowal of full civil rights to French Jews. A year later, he became a member of the first National Assembly of the French Revolution, where he led the struggle in favor of Jewish emancipation. He also campaigned for the freedom of slaves in the French Caribbean colonies (which, in 1789, had as many slaves as the entire United States). When the Assembly approved a radical reform plan for the Catholic Church in France, Grégoire was among those priests who supported it, and won election as a bishop. He subsequently voted for the abolition of the monarchy and the death of King Louis XVI, but refused to abjure Christianity even when pressured to do so. During the radical phase of the French revolution he continued to defend the rights of people of color, and also became the leading advocate of French linguistic unification (at the time, most French people did not speak standard French as their mother tongue). After the Revolution, this radical cleric, while loathed by royalists, remained a well-known figure and prolific author. In 1808, he published one of the first studies of literature by people of African descent.

Image Credit: “Pairs of angels, sculptures; Martyrs’ Square – Place des Martyrs – Martelaarsplaats 3” by Dr Les (Leszek – Leslie) Sachs. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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