Wahoo quelle histoire !
The sign of the shop, hanging at upper left, displays a decapitated woman’s body above the words “Tout en est bon”, from the saying, “Une femme sans tête: tout en est bon”, meaning “A woman without a head: everything is good”. To make the message absolutely clear, the block of text encourages men to bring their difficult wives to this head doctor, where their brains will be reforged and purged of all screechy, angry, lunatic, obstinate, rebellious, willful, and lazy ways. Any woman with a mind of her own is guaranteed a graphically brutal straightening out.
As sexist satire goes, this is dark. Even darker is the fact that, as soon as the image appeared, the head-pounding blacksmith “became all the rage” in France.2 Publishers began to churn out stand-alone broadsheets of his image in order to feed a demand for cheap copies, and versions of him in his forge spread from France to Germany and Italy.3 An entire almanac calendar for 1660 was dedicated to Lustucru.4 He was written into the latest comic plays and poems, and his image was even stamped on tokens or “jetons” (metal coins used mainly as counters in the age before calculators). In today’s terms, he went viral.
His name, Lustucru, comes from a slurring of “L’eusses-tu-cru?”, a stock phrase used in that period by theatrical fools, which meant, “Would you have believed it?” or in this case, “Would you have thought a woman’s head could be fixed?” According to the seventeenth-century French writer Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Lustucru was born from a desire for male revenge.
Je me demande bien de quelle revenche contre les femmes auraient les hommes de cette époque et dont parle ce Gédéon Tallemant.
Male anxiety regarding the growing influence and power of women was generally on the rise in France during the 1650s. Women had begun to gain some standing in the literary arts and were established enough to have been satirized as “les précieuses”, a type of clever woman who frequented Parisian salons, wrote books, and favored an elegantly refined (or, to other minds, affected and pretentious) speaking and writing style.
Les femmes n’ont pas gagné en puissance vers 1650, c’est même tout l’inverse, c’est la période de la création de l’académie française, institution dont le but principale est de baillonner les femmes et excisé la langue de toute trace de féminin qui ne soit pas humiliant. C’est aussi la période de la chasse aux sorcière, des interdictions de reprendre le commerce familial en cas de veuvage,
#séduction_à_la_française #inversion_patriarcale #blâmer_la_victime #misogynie #féminicide #domination_masculine #mégèrisme #histoire #marque #cannibalisme #lobotomie #hystérie #femmes #guerre_des_sexes #couple #amour #hétérosexualité #domination_masculine #chirurgie #violences_médicale #patriarcat #matriarcat
