So it is 0-dark hundred the night before this one, and I wake up and I can’t resume unconsciousness, so I sneak to the spare room and grab my infallible insomnia cure, a volume of the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and I open it at random and start reading.
An entry or two into my session, I come across a biographical entry for a long-obscured figure in French financial history, Étienne de Silhouette, who in 1759 had a very brief (eight months) and unpopular (at least with the wrong people) run as Comptroller of France.
In that role, Silhouette had charge of the nation’s finances at the fulcrum of the Seven Years War, the point at which French fortunes were turning in both North America and Europe after an initial run of successes against Britain. The effort of sustaining warfare on two continents had strained the national budget past the breaking point — Silhouette’s budget for 1760 predicted an income of 283 million livres against expected spending of 503 million, including close to 100 million (or 20 percent of the total, for those of you keeping score at home) to pay interest on a debt incurred while prosecuting a war that France could not afford.
Silhouette recognized the problem and proposed a variety of ideas to close the gap, all of which turned on taxing the rich. He was, of course, hounded out of office forthwith.
By now you probably think you know where this is going, but you would be wrong, mostly; I think with this crowd I can merely say plus ça change and leave it at that.
No, what got my notice at three a.m. was what came out of the storm of ridicule and rejection that drove Silhouette back into private life. He was derided as a parsimonious fool, someone with no grasp of the fine detail of finance — a blank outline, perhaps, or what we now call a silhouette. The jibe caught on — and it stuck, to the point that in 1835 the French Academy admitted the word into the dictionary, and hence, formally, into the French language and, by now, our own.
Which piece of delightful but useless knowledge sleeplessness has lodged into my brain, probably permanently — and, with this post, perhaps, into yours as well.
Consider this a night-shift open thread.
Image: Silhouette likeness of Hermann Graf v. Görtz-Wrisberg as a student at Göttingen, ~1840
Stillwater
If only he could have slept on that idea for a few years.
Jewish Steel
If only he’d had the Chinese to help bankroll his wars. Laissez les bons temps rouler!
MattR
I was annoyed that I was still up after 4, but now I feel rewarded.
freelancer
“We got a lot of rich guys heads to cut off today, and I think we’ll get through this.”
Joey Maloney
Here are some words that will become common nouns for future generations, with proposed definitions:
A krugman is a shrill cry warning of danger ahead, while a roubini is a portent of doom.
On the other hand, a boehner is still just a big dick.
Keith G
Which brings the seed for a contest:
200 years from now, which current (to us) government official’s name will evolve in to a usage like silhouette or Quisling?
Lysana
@Keith G:
Santorum maintains some staying power.
bemused
I am up way too early in NE Minn. I took a walk outside and was horrified to see it is misting and the three vehicles parked in the driveway looked like they had a coating of ice on them. I felt the window on one and yup, it’s ice. The freezing rain has started already. Crap. We have three kids home that have to drive to Minneapolis with one scheduled to fly to NY City tomorrow. From the forecast in the past two days we were already thinking flights out of Mpls could be delayed or cancelled and now I’m wondering if the kids will even be able to get to Mpls.
Platonicspoof
Day or night, I wonder what delightful but wrong info gets fed permanently into my brain.
Earlier tonight in a PBS documentary called Athens: The Dawn of Democracy they were talking about the prevalence of animal sacrifice, blood stains everywhere, and then said that the word ‘testify’ came from the practice of people appearing in court being required to hold a pair of animal testicles.
I couldn’t find that etymology while googling, but more than one hit said
it isn’t true.
Between the vivid image and people possibly associating humiliation in public court with castration, the documentary may have burned useless and wrong info into my head.
Platonicspoof
@bemused:
Normally I’d feel silly preaching to the choir in NE Minnesota, but last week my niece and her husband walked away from a roll-over accident followed by a near miss from a car behind them that hit the same ice
because they were wearing seat belts and
because they were lucky.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Joey Maloney:
Improved.
The rich viewed him the way they viewed everyone who isn’t like them (and they still do), as a silhouette. Nothing substantial or of substance, like themselves.
The more things change…
p.a.
Finances from the 7 Years War, but especially fiscal troubles arising from French aid in the American Revolution, were important contributing causes of the French Rev.
jurassicpork
If Christine O’Donnell taught us anything, it’s that Republicans are never too stupid to be crooked or obscenely lucky.
Montanareddog
The Seven Years War is sometimes described as the first World War because it was fought on 3 continents – North America, Europe and in India.
It was the war that confirmed the rising ascendancy of Britain over a declining France.
The first action of the war was conducted by a young British colonial officer in North America, Lt Col George Washington of the Virginia Militia, an attack on French patrol in Ohio
The concluding treaty of Paris saw Britain gaining control of Canada (in exchange France got Guadeloupe) and Florida (from Spain). The resulting British hegemony in North America east of the Mississippi can be viewed as one of the factors in the campaign for US independence that soon began, because the colonists no longer had to rely on Britain to protect them from Spanish or French ambitions.
Interesting new angle from Tom L though – about the French elite’s willingness to go to war but unwillingness to fund it
rachel
A big, weeping dick, you mean.
bemused
@Platonicspoof:
Driving on black ice is a freaking nightmare and this stuff is supposed to last into saturday maybe mixed with snow. With these warm temps, any snow will sticky and tricky. Oh joy. Just walking back into the house using the entry that has no overhang was treacherous. Right now, I’m keeping my fingers crossed there are no power outages.
Ian Preston
I vaguely remember hearing someone once say that the publication of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911 was the last date in human history at which it was feasible for a single individual to know everything of importance in all branches of human knowledge. That was therefore the date at which knowledge dissolved regrettably and irrecoverably into separate subject areas. I can’t remember who and can’t find the quote though.
Bill E Pilgrim
Actually not quite: He also had a hobby of making paper outline portraits of people, and those ended up being called Silhouettes, the mockery being that it was a cheap art form, and so was he. Cheap as in parsimonious in other words, not because he was a shadow or like a cutout figure or etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette#Traditional_Silhouette_portraiture
Bill E Pilgrim
By the way, and related to nothing here: Can the world please stop using “But… but… ” as an Internet commenting or posting trope, as in “But…. but… I thought that..” or “But…. but…. So and So told us that….”
It’s the kind of thing that may have been very slightly clever when someone being inventive used it for the first time, but when it becomes a tic you see all over the Internet is the most annoying thing on the planet.
If generations from now people are writing about this “But… but…” expression, trying to figure out how it became a common figure of speech, I’m going to be very annoyed, even if I have to time travel to do it.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Actually this is the quote I really meant to include above, but it’s all there in the links.
Richard Fox
Have no idea whose name will become standard usage.. but just for the sake of fun I thought I would mention my favorite: ‘Gerrymander’.
“Elbridge Gerry + salamander; from the shape of an election district formed during Gerry’s governorship of Massachusetts”.
(Merriam- Webster.)
…Any politician who becomes welded to a salamander in the vernacular gives me hope for humanity for some reason.
Carry on all. And good morning to you.
Chyron HR
@Bill E Pilgrim:
U mad? Epic fail. Why so beta?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Chyron HR: Oddly, those I don’t mind. Oddly being the operative word as it is often with me.
Southern Beale
I really can’t go into the stupidity of Jonah Goldberg’s current column, which says the repeal of DADT and gay marriage are good news for Republicans (of course they are, it’s ALWAYS good news for Republicans!) but thankfully Salon’s Alex Pareene has already picked it apart for me.
And with that I’m off to the gym …
Mr. Nobody
I don’t profess to be an expert on any of this, but the citation in the wiki entry says that there is no evidence of him making paper portraits in the book that was cited:
Most other sites I looked at seemed to lean towards something closer to Tom’s interpretation.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Chyron HR: Oh and just to be clear, in case it wasn’t: what I’m referring to is a particular use in an intentionally disingenuous way, as sarcasm, that seems to be sweeping the nets.
For example someone responding to a post with news that inflation is still nonexistent writing “But… but…. the Republican economists told us that inflation is just around the corner!” Or here it would be more “But… but… I thought it was all Rahm’s fault!” And so on.
Once was cute, thirty billion times not nearly as much.
p.a.
@Southern Beale:
No one can, and hope to return. He’s the black hole of stupid.
(Ahh, I thought about the metaphor too much; if he were really the black hole of stupid no stupid would escape, and that would be a good thing. Maybe he’s the pulsar of stupid, emitting stupid at regular intervals.)
Bill E Pilgrim
@Mr. Nobody:
The popular interpretation in France as far as I understand it (where I live, for whatever that’s worth) is that the name came about because he was thought to make portraits like that, which leaves room for the fact that he may not have actually done so. In other words it all could have been rumor that he did, like a lot of what went on in those days (not to mention ours of course) about what Marie Antoinette said or didn’t say and etc.
Could all be wrong, clearly, I can see either one being the case. I do think it’s pretty likely that it was the cheapness of the art form that was the point rather than the idea of his “ephemeral tenure” as one dictionary entry guesses, but that’s just me guessing also.
timb
@p.a.: Right. So, here’s the lesson from history, in 1754, France could have course corrected and taxed the rich, stopped fighting losing wars abroad (although, to be fair, the English cured them of this past-time the old fashioned way within the next 70 years), and re-distributed their national income in a more fair manner. The wars of 1790-1798 (pre-Napoleonic Empire) revealed how powerful France could be when her entire population was mobilized toward a goal.
They could have done all that in 1754, but they chose not too.
In 1792-1795 the impoverished population of Paris took care of reforming society for them in a more drastic fashion.
jheartney
Silhouettes were, in pre-photography days, the poor man’s portrait format. Making them didn’t require skill at drawing; all you had to do was trace the subject’s shadow while in profile.
The downmarket nature of silhouette-making is most probably what they were aiming at when they appropriated this guy’s name.
Suck It Up!
wtf?
Cheryl from Maryland
@jurassicpork: It would be nice if the “Son of Sam” law applied to Ms. O’Donnell’s book profits. Per the internets, Delaware has one.
Original Lee
Thank you for this post. I’ve been reading about the Madoff trustee lawsuits for the last week, and this little piece of info about Silhouette has made me feel better about it all, in a perverse reverse psychology way.
danimal
@Bill E Pilgrim: But…but…how do I express sarcasm now?
Don’t say you didn’t see it coming.
Bubba Dave
@bemused:
Speaking as someone who lived in Rochester, MN for three years and now lives in Dallas: Snow is a message from God telling you to move south.
Just sayin’.
drkrick
“So I was at a friend’s house looking for something to read, and came upon a book with the title Girl to Grab. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. – Martin Mull
drkrick
@Southern Beale: One of Roy Edroso’s commentators pointed out that expecting a logical argument in a Jonah Goldberg column is like taking the back off the TV during The Lone Ranger and expecting to grab a couple of little horses.
Origuy
I’m also up earlier than I’d like, because I spent the last week three time zones ahead. I’ve been reading Our First Revolution by Michael Barone, about the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James II, a Catholic, was ousted in favor of William of Orange, a Protestant. The comments about Catholics then sound very much like those about Muslims today.
bemused
@Bubba Dave:
God knows better than to send me a message to move south. I’ll take our winters over super hot and humid summers.
noncarborundum
@Mr. Nobody:
I don’t know where I read it, but the explanation that makes most sense to me is that because Silhouette was generally considered to be a cheap bastard, the phrase “à la Silhouette” (“in the manner of Silhouette”) became a popular way of saying “on the cheap”. This phrase was applied to a number of things, including (but not limited to) paper cutout portraits, which were certainly “on the cheap” compared to the painted kind. Once the phrase “portrait à la Silhouette” had become attached to the practice, and enough time had passed, it was easy for people to assume, after the manner of folk etymology, that the reason for the name “portrait in the manner of Silhouette” was that Silhouette himself had made such portraits – or, perhaps, had himself been a blank outline.
slag
And this is why you never read nonfiction when you’re trying to get to sleep.
JGabriel
A bit belated — but that’s a great story, Tom. Thanks for sharing it with us.
.
Glen Tomkins
Crony Monarchism
Whether it’s the crony socialism that brought down the SU, the crony capitalism that may yet bring down the US, or the crony monarchism that brought down the Bourbons, the “crony” element, rather than being a minor descriptor or modifier, is actually the dominant component. All three, despite the huge ideological differences in self-understanding represented by “socialism”, “capitalism” and “monarchy”, are far more alike than they are different from one another.
The failure of Silhouette’s plan to tax the people who actually had the money in the France of his day, despite the imminence of budgetary meltdown, was only a prefigurement of the more famous and consequential failure of Jacques Necker to get a similar plan through in 1787-88. The bluest of the bluebloods in the Parlement de Paris, France’s SCOTUS of the time, decided that Necker’s plan wouldn’t be legal as a royal decree, and that the Estates General would be the only legal source of such new taxation. So the Estates were called in 1789 after a 175 year hiatus, and the rest is history.
Neither Necker nor Silhouette were creative geniuses, or especially enlightened and advanced thinkers. It’s just that axing the people who actually had the money in French society was the obvious only way to deal with the govt expenditures required of the nation state that France had become. But the people who had the money in 1614, the merchants and farmers, by 1789 had had a chance to stratify themselves into the winner cronies, who bought into noble, tax exempt status (or came from old noble families slumming in money-making enterprises), and loser everyone else. Everyone else, the people who by definition had failed to successfully work the crony network, didn’t have the money to form an adequate tax base.
The crown made do over the decades, and then the generations, by borrowing, and by scrimping on public services (even compared to free-market happy England, people noticed how crappy the roads were in France by mid-century), and then by selling off govt assets and prerogatives. The patents of nobility that granted various levels of tax exemption were a prominent early and ongoing means of mortgaging future revenues for the sake of one-time income. But the final step was the abdication of the tax-collecting function itself. This was sold, for a one-time cash infusion, to a private enterprise, the tax farm, which was given the right to collect the full tax from those incapable of protecting themselves from the workings of the law, in exchange for the initial purchase price and the annual payment to the govt of some fraction of the tax revenues they collected.
We know how well that eventually worked out for the ancien regime. But we tend to lose sight of what the French people were revolting against. It wasn’t so much monarchy or aristrocracy as it was the crony component of the ancien regime. Most of those who went to the guillotine held no real titles of nobility. They were mostly tax farmers and war profiteers, and mostly non-noble.
Our current ancien regime in this country is absolutely correct in its confidence that the masses in this country will never rise in revolt against its sacred capitalism, or the plutocracy for which it stands. Lefties could preach revolution until they go hoarse (mostly they just don’t bother anymore), and that will just make the masses clutch tighter to their golden calf idols. Americans worship these sacred cows as fervently as the French once did their own — right up until the utter failure of the rich and powerful to run the ongoing scam that was the ancien regime in a professional manner that preserved a veneer of respectability, made them see these people as contemptible thieves and grifters.
Maybe our regime will never become ancien. Maybe it will right itself. But it will have to right itself. It has succeeded too finally and completely in winning the faith of the masses for us to expect any check from them, any check within the system, on cronyism as the dominant force in our policy making. But it really doesn’t appear that self-awareness and self-control are the strong suits of our cronies. If I had to bet money at even odds, I would bet against any self-correction in our system. The cronies will just keep pressing their advantage unchecked until they either wreck the system, or they become so transparently just thieves and grifters that their former worshippers will turn on them.