From Sophie's front desk — Monday, September 7
BBC News — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: an institution claims neutrality, makes a choice for someone else's conscience, and discovers it can't have both. The Eiffel Tower locked its doors after staff protested — women removed from certain floors during a Hindu delegation's visit, the union calling it humiliation, Paris investigating whether religious accommodation means erasing half your workforce. The fracture isn't about the visit itself; it's about who gets to decide what counts as respect. Benjamin Franklin has the first word on this, then Seneca.
I walked the Champ de Mars in '77 and '78, before the iron lady rose, when the ground held only market gardens and the smell of cabbage soup drifting from the barracks. The Parisians I knew — Condorcet, Turgot, the ladies of the salon — would have laughed until their snuffboxes fell, then fallen silent. A monument to industry shutting its doors because the faithful cannot bear the sight of a woman at her post? The mind reels. In my printing house, Deborah ran the shop when I was in London. She kept the accounts, hired the journeymen, chased the debtors.
No clergyman of any denomination ever asked her to step aside. Had one tried, she would have handed him the composing stick and told him to set his own type. My sister Jane, fourteen years younger and poor as a church mouse, wrote me letters sharper than any pamphlet I ever printed. She managed a household of twelve on a husband's wandering wages. I never once heard her say a man's piety excused him from seeing her face. The union calls it humiliation.
The mayor calls it investigation. I call it the old bargain: we will tolerate your rites if you tolerate our laws... But the bargain breaks when the rite demands the law kneel. The tower stands three hundred meters high. It does not bend for the wind. It should not bend for this.
A society that hides its women to honor a god has already forgotten... which end of the telescope it holds.
The Nine Sisters had known nothing but tribulations since they had held, on November 28, 1778, a grandiose commemoration of Voltaire—with Franklin’s rather rash participation. The American may not have gauged the intensity of anger aroused in the Church by Voltaire’s anticlerical…
sancti Viti. François Grenet a éprouvé quelques effets; il a les yeux malades, particulièrement le droit, dont il ne voit presque pas, & où il a une tumeur considérable. Quand on a magnétisé l’œil gauche en approchant, en agitant le pouce de près & assez long-temps, il a éprouvé …
Les Mois. Finally, a huge painting representing the apotheosis of Voltaire was unveiled, and Franklin, along with two other participants, laid beneath it the crowns that had just been bestowed upon them. The assembly then transferred itself for the banquet to a room full of flowe…
This is the only document among Franklin’s papers that alludes to his participation in the Masonic ceremony held on November 28 by the Loge des Neuf Soeurs to honor Voltaire’s memory. Coming, as it did, in the footsteps of the August 25 commemoration by the Académie française of …
[before March 23, 1779?] L’hotesse de L’hostel de Joui a versailles Rue des Recolets Reclame L’avantage qu’elle a eu de Loger M. franklin chez elle pour le Recevoir et ses Equipages quand il ira faire sa Cour. C’est unne femme Estimée et Recommandée par les Bureaus de M. de Verge…
Lucilius, you ask me to weigh a tower in Paris shut down because women were cleared from its floors to accommodate a visiting faith. I think of Corsica, eight years in that wind-scoured rock, where the only dignity I kept was the dignity no proconsul could grant and no exile could strip. The women at that iron lattice were not asked; they were moved. That is the whole matter. Power has always negotiated with power over the heads of those who serve.
Nero's court taught me that lesson daily , the senator's wife seated lower than the freedman's favorite, the philosopher's counsel heard only when it flattered. The mechanism is ancient: a visiting dignity requires a local humiliation, and the institution complies because compliance is its habit. The union calls it humiliation. The mayor calls it investigation. I call it the same transaction that made me tutor a boy who would later order my veins opened.
We build monuments to the sky and then forget the hands that hold them. The tower stands. The women who tend it were told their presence offended a god they do not worship. That offense exists only in the arrangement men made to spare themselves awkwardness. A principle that bends for a visitor was never a principle.
Write me from Sicily , has the sea there ever asked permission to touch the shore?
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
belongs; whoever, therefore, touches anything is sacrilegious." Again, when he bids men break open temples and pillage the Capitol without fear of the wrath of heaven, he declares that no one can be sacrilegious; because, whatever a man takes away, he takes from one place which b…
either by reason nor by any other art for knowing the thing which is the subject of the inquiry. Wherefore when we ought to share a friend’s danger, or that of our country, you must not consult the diviner whether you ought to share it. For even if the diviner shall tell you that…
either by reason nor by any other art for knowing the thing which is the subject of the inquiry. Wherefore when we ought to share a friend’s danger, or that of our country, you must not consult the diviner whether you ought to share it. For even if the diviner shall tell you that…
The story ran in B.B.C. News. A public institution closed because women were removed from it — a collision between religious accommodation and the equal presence that secular spaces assume, and Paris had to investigate which principle held. That's all for today.