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A review by lajacquerie
Smack-Bam, or the Art of Governing Men: Political Fairy Tales of Édouard Laboulaye by Édouard Laboulaye, Edouard Laboulaye
3.0
Welp, I like fairy tales, so when I realized the Princeton University Press had a whole section on fairy tales, I had to grab one.
Laboulaye was a French legal and political thinker (and practitioner) who lived through the Revolution, Napoleon, and subsequent republics/empires. He saw a lot, to put it bluntly, and had much reason to muse on what might be the best form of government, the natural inclinations of man, and the arc of civilization. Within his fairy tales (some of which he wrote fresh, many of which he retold from their original Baltic, Russian, Italian, etc sources) he often explored and satirized the politics of the world he saw around him (or hoped for). The best innovations here come when the narrator pokes in on the fairy tales, giving them a modern feel ("and we cannot know what happened next because there is a blot of ink on those lines"), especially when sharing his less, erm, positive feelings on monarchs, ministers, and courtiers.
Nothing amazing here, but a neat little lesson in how modern fairy tales were still being written in the second half of the 1800s, who might do such a thing and why.
Laboulaye was a French legal and political thinker (and practitioner) who lived through the Revolution, Napoleon, and subsequent republics/empires. He saw a lot, to put it bluntly, and had much reason to muse on what might be the best form of government, the natural inclinations of man, and the arc of civilization. Within his fairy tales (some of which he wrote fresh, many of which he retold from their original Baltic, Russian, Italian, etc sources) he often explored and satirized the politics of the world he saw around him (or hoped for). The best innovations here come when the narrator pokes in on the fairy tales, giving them a modern feel ("and we cannot know what happened next because there is a blot of ink on those lines"), especially when sharing his less, erm, positive feelings on monarchs, ministers, and courtiers.
Nothing amazing here, but a neat little lesson in how modern fairy tales were still being written in the second half of the 1800s, who might do such a thing and why.