|
Gambling in pre-revolutionary
France had the reputation of being toléré mais
non permis: tolerated, but not legal. Gambling,
especially high-stakes gambling was a traditionally aristocratic
pursuit before the revolution. Aristocrats disdained the love of
money, viewed as a middle-class, or bourgeois, value.
The pre-revolutionary
bourgeois view of gambling, as a result of the aristocracy's stigma
of gambling, was entirely negative. The dislike of gambling "allowed
those whose social status depended entirely on money to adopt a
posture of moral repugnance toward its movement in purest form."
(Kavanagh 57) The bourgeois' social
status indeed depended entirely upon money. "It is this obsession
with erasing their own shameful origins in money that explains why
gambling became for the ascendant bourgeoisie a scandalous evil
marked by a moral value totally unlike that given it by the traditional
nobility." (Kavanagh 56) The aristocracy
was dispised by the bourgeoisie, as were their social practices,
such as gambling.
"The most important
advantage of the denunciation of gambling for the bourgeoisie related,
however, not so much to the high-stakes gambling of the aristocracy
as to the equally pandemic gambling of the urban poor." (Kavanagh
57) Let us not forget that the poor also gambled, but in a less
gaudy manner than the aristocracy. Again, the bourgeosie attempts
to define itself via what it is not: not the poor, nor the aristocracy.
"The ennobled bourgeois,
when he raised his eyes from the circulation of money, discovered
that no matter what he possesed and no matter what he could purchase,
he remained, precisely because he depended on money, an object of
thinly disguised contempt for that segment of the nobility whose
legitimacy was infinitely more obvious than his own" (Kavanagh
51) Through the pre-revolutionary era to well into the modern era,
the bourgeoisie repeatedly had to prove himself better than others
in society. In pre-revolutionary times, the bourgeois goal was to
prove more moral than the aristocracy. After the decline of the
nobility resultant from the revolution, the bourgeois desire was
to prove himself better than the poor man through his conspicuous
consumption, unwittingly making himself the mirror image of the
aristocracy he loathed. This unconscious replication of the recently
deposed aristocracy adopted the noble pastimes, including gambling.
In spite of the fact
that the average gambler was now a bourgeois, and not an aristocrat,
"gambling went on during and after the Revolution much the
same as it had in pre-revolutionary times" (Detrell
and Paulson 13)
|
Ladies Gambling.
Anon. c. 1780
Above is yet another
caricature of the world of gambling. These persons, however,
belong to the aristocracy. The artist is obviously poking
fun of the aristocracy, by showing noble ladies in the unfeminine
act of gambling. The artist renders the nobility through costume:
large skirts and large jewelery on the women, and wigs and
short waistcoats on the men. The central couple is an interesting
pair, as the artist has managed to give the female character
a drunken air. The male has a manipulative air: he looks down
upon the female, and makes "bunny ears" of her cards.
To the right and left of the central figure are similar couples
with the male
|
|
