Beautiful And Complete Corruption

Anatole France's Where Did We Go Wrong Tale?

The Gods Will Have Blood is an excellent journey from maturation to corruption. Gamelin is a bright eyed and bushy tailed artist driven by zealous idealism...who better to put in control of whether or not people keep their heads? I can't see how it could possibly go wrong.

In the beginning I love Gamelin, if I were a woman I would fall in love with him. In the end my attraction to Gamelin is matched only by my fear of him, ever increasing with each gruesome and brutal deed.

France turns itself on its head during the revolution. They took their own perverse interpretation of ideas like Rousseau's and polluted themselves. They turned on the monarchy and then on themselves.

Gamelin has one of the most beautiful quotes I've read this semester: "Child! You will grow up to be free and happy, and you will owe it to the infamous Gamelin. I am steeped in blood so that you may be happy. I am cruel, that you may be kind. I am pitiless so that tomorrow all Frenchmen will embrace one another with tears of joy." (230). He then says the following about the child: "I held that child in my arms; perhaps I shall have his mother sent to the guillotine." (230).

 Are these the words of an artist? Or is this what happens when you take the drive that makes a good artist and turn him loose with rebellious ideals? Did Gamelin begin as a dime-a-dozen artist trying to make himself famous? Where did he go wrong? Is this a corruption of the idealist? I believe that Gamelin would not exist in a society that would not have someone such as Gamelin existing. If that sounds tricky that's because all I'm saying is that if Gamelin existed in late 1700's France it is because the way the world was playing out someone like Gamelin was an inevitable player. Invited or not, created or not, we have to live with the monsters we contributed to making. We have to try not to corrupt everything we touch, no matter how good we are at it.

But: what if we have been corrupt all along? We do seem, after all, to be primed for corruption. We do seem to be perfect creatures of corruption. Are maturation and corruption all that different? Are sex and violence as separate as we consider in our daily politeness? Our book has sex evolve from a basic animal urge to "an ecstasy of sexual horror".  Or are the French just messed up? Anatole asked: Where did we go wrong? I reply: You were French, that's a starting point.