Vatel: Food, Entertainment and Intrigue at the Court of the Sun King

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17th Century France, Ancien Regime, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Gerard Depardieu, Kings and Queens, Louis XIV, Marquis de Lauzun, Tim Roth, Uma Thurman, Vatel

Vatel (2000, dir. Roland Joffé) tells the story of Louis XIV’s three day visit to the Chateau de Chantilly, the palace of Louis de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé in 1671, during the lead-up to the Franco-Dutch War. It centers on Condé’s Master of Festivities and steward, François Vatel.

Vatel was one of the most celebrated chefs of his generation. He started as a pastry chef and came to work for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s first finance minister. In 1661, when Louis came to visit Fouquet, Vatel orchestrated such a sumptuous festival that Louis used it as an excuse to arrest Fouquet for embezzlement (since he had already intended to ruin Fouquet). After that, Vatel came to serve Condé, one of the greatest generals of his day and a patron to a number of important French authors, including both Racine and Moliere.

Vatel is often, though falsely, credited with inventing whipped cream, which is sometimes called Chantilly Cream, especially in France. He may not have invented it, but he might have played a role in popularizing it.

The Chantilly Festival

In 1671, Louis announced his intentions to pay Condé a visit at his chateau at Chantilly. Such visits were a tool that Louis used to keep his powerful nobles in line, because they were an honor that could not be refused, but they carried with them the staggering burden of having to house, feed and entertain the entire royal court, which included around 600 nobles and several thousand royal ministers and servants. Forcing a noble to drain his financial reserves to host the king left them with less money with which to cause trouble for him, and made them dependent on him for financial favors.

The chateau de Chantilly

Louis gave Condé and Vatel barely two weeks to make all the arrangements, and the unfortunate Vatel reportedly got little sleep in that period. He was a man of extremely high standards and became increasingly upset over small hitches in the execution of his grand festival.

Our best source for what happened at this festival is the letters of Madame de Sévigné, whose letters to her daughter and daughter-in-law are one of the most important records of life at the French court. Although she was not at the Chantilly festival, she apparently learned the details from another member of the court. The best way to describe the incident is to quote extensively from one of her letters.

“The King arrived Thursday evening; there was everything that one could wish: hunting, lanterns, moonlight, a walk, the meal in a spot carpeted with daffodils. People ate; there were a few tables where there was no roast, because there were several more people eating than had been expected. Vatel obsessed over this, saying several times “I have lost honour; here is an affront that I can’t bear”. He said to Gourville, “My head is spinning; I haven’t slept for 12 nights. Help me to keep things going”. Gourville helped how he could, but Vatel couldn’t stop thinking about the missing roast at the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth tables (though not at the King’s table). The Prince went to Vatel’s room and said to him, “Vatel, everything is fine: nothing was as beautiful as that dinner for the King”. Vatel said to him, “My Lord, you are too kind. I know that there was no roast at two tables”. “Not at all,” said the Prince. “Don’t fret about it, everything is fine”.

“Night fell, but the fireworks, which had cost 16,000 francs, were a flop because it turned foggy. At 4 a.m., Vatel was everywhere (fretting) while everyone else was asleep. He met a small supplier doing a morning delivery, who had only two loads of fish. Vatel said to him, “Is this all?” The supplier replied, “Yes”. He didn’t know that when Vatel said “all”, he had been referring to the requests he had made from all the ports. Vatel waited a while, but no other deliveries came. He got in a frenzy, thinking he would have no other fish. He found Gourville and said, “I won’t survive this insult; my honour and reputation are at stake”. Gourville made light of it.

“Vatel went up to his room, put his sword against the door, and caused it to go through his heart; he had to do this three times, because the first two hadn’t wounded him deeply enough to kill him.

“At this point, fish deliveries began arriving from all over. People were looking for Vatel for instructions; they went to his room, forced the door, and found him in pool of his own blood. Some ran to tell the Prince, who was plunged into despair. The Duke cried, because he had come to Burgundy because of Vatel.

“The Prince told the King, with great sadness, that people were saying it was because of Vatel’s pride; people were both praising and blaming his courage. The King said he had put off coming to Chantilly for five years because he understood how much stress his visits caused. He said that from now on, the Prince should only worry about feeding two tables of people, and not worry about the rest. He said he wouldn’t allow the Prince to go to such great effort anymore, but that it was too late for poor Vatel.

“Gourville undertook to make up for the loss of Vatel, and did it. Everyone ate well, walked, played, hunted, the perfume of daffodils was everywhere, everything was enchanting. Yesterday, which was Saturday, everyone did the same again, and in the evening, the King went to Liancourt, where he ordered a late supper.”

It seems clear that Vatel’s suicide was driven by a combination of high standards, the stress of being responsible for the entire royal court, lack of sleep, and what he saw as a disastrous stroke of bad luck. We might also suspect he was a high-strung man.

The Film

Roland Joffé (working from a script by Jeanne Labrune and Tom Stoppard) turns the Chantilly festival into an exploration of the French court under Louis XIV. In the film, which explicitly declares itself to be a ‘true story’, Condé (Julian Glover) is informed by the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth) that Louis wishes to visit and enjoy the simple pleasures of the country, which, Lauzun explains, means that Condé should spare no expense whatsoever to entertain the king. Condé then tells Vatel (Gerard Depardieu) that he has good news and bad news. The bad news is that the king is coming to visit Chantilly and the good news is that France might go to war with Holland. Condé is bankrupt and needs the king to pay his debts, and war means that the king will need Condé’s services as a general. So, if the festival goes well and war does happen, Condé will probably be able to get the king to pay his debts. (The idea that Condé was bankrupt is improbable; he was an extremely rich man.)

Depardieu and Glover as Vatel and Condé

And so the film unfolds as the French court descends on Chantilly and Vatel works to orchestrate this enormous festival. The film is chiefly interested in two things: the enormous effort it takes to feed the court and stage the entertainments, and the complex intrigues of the French court. In this second plotline, the chief figures are Lauzun; the king’s brother (known as Monsieur); and Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman), a minor member of the court who is the king’s most recent lover. Lauzun wants to sleep with Montausier, who is not interested in him, but she grows increasingly interested with Vatel because he is not interested in the complex games played by the court, while Monsieur is sexually attracted to Vatel’s adolescent protégé and grows offended when Vatel refuses to give him to Monsieur.

Someone who is clearly much more knowledgeable than I am about Louis’ court wrote a very lengthy discussion of the courtly characters of the film, which you can read here. So rather than commenting of the accuracy of the characters, I’ll focus on other things.

Perhaps the most valuable thing about the film is the way that it focuses so much attention on what goes on behind the scenes at a 17^th century palace. Vatel’s scenes concentrate very heavily on his efforts to direct the enormous army of cooks and servants who are critical to the success of the festival. We watch Vatel overseeing the cooks, telling them how to prepare various dishes. When problems arise, he improvises a variety of solutions. (when he realizes that he does not have enough meat to serve everyone at the first dinner, he orders a cook to produce a dish with mushrooms. When someone asks what meat is in the dish, he replies “unicorn”.) Lauzun asks Vatel to produce a spun sugar masterpiece to impress Montausier. Because he is so busy, Vatel refuses, until Condé orders him to do it, and so we get to watch him produce a bowl of fake sugar fruit.

Vatel working with spun sugar

The film also addresses the various problems of supply that Vatel faces. Early on, the tradesmen of Chantilly refuse to provide him with any further supplies until Condé pays their bills. Vatel explains that unless the festival is a success, Condé will not be able to pay, so they have to extend him further credit to have any hope of getting their money. While this may not be historically accurate in Condé’s case, it is an excellent example of a real problem that nobles and the businessmen they patronized experienced. In another scene, an entire shipment of glass candle-globes arrive broken because the roads were too rough, and Vatel has to improvise a replacement for them.

Equally interesting are the entertainments themselves. The film shows us two elaborate theatrical spectacles offered for the king’s amusement. Here’s the first one:

The second one involves an elaborate fireworks show that accompanies the arrival of an enormous whale, which opens its mouth to reveal a singer who is lifted above the banquet by a complex system of pulleys. I don’t know enough about 17^th century engineering to know whether these two shows were actually possible with the technology of the time (if I had to guess, I’d say the film is probably exaggerating somewhat), but they are certainly suggestive of the kinds of entertainment that 17^th century kings liked to see, and of the theatricality of Louis’ court, which was key to his success as a monarch.

The fireworks at the second banquet

The Court

The other half of the film dwells on the life of the court, and here I think the film is somewhat less true to its source material. The members of the court as shown as being extremely decadent. Louis has brought both his formal mistress, Madame de Montespan and his actual mistress, Montausier, and Lauzun wants to sleep with the latter, even if it means blackmailing her. When he sends her Vatel’s impressive fake fruit masterpiece, she doesn’t even look at it before rejecting it, so Lauzun randomly selects another woman of the court to receive the gift; the message here is that Lauzun and Montausier are too jaded to appreciate it for the work of art that it is. In another scene, Monsieur takes revenge on Vatel by casually breaking the whale prop.

The court gambles constantly. Early on, Condé makes the mistake of playing too well and has to start losing intentionally, just to please the king. (“Has Condé lost his chateau?” “Not if he plays his cards wrong.”) Later, Louis and Monsieur casually bet expensive jewelry in another game. Condé tries to demur, saying he has nothing so valuable to wager, but Louis orders him to wager Vatel. Vatel, who is devoted to Condé and has trusted him enough to make major sacrifices, is upset to learn of the betrayal.

The whole point of these scenes is to contrast the jaded nobles, who have no regard for anyone beneath them, with Vatel, the commoner who is far more moral and decent than the people he is keeping entertained. The only member of the court who has any morals is Montausier, who increasingly feels a connection to Vatel as the only decent man around her.

Lauzun hitting on Montausier

When Vatel finally commits suicide, no one seems to actually care. The king is told that Vatel did it because the fish hadn’t arrived, but that’s not the real reason. But Madame de Sévigné’s letter makes clear that many people were in fact distressed by Vatel’s suicide, and the king seems to have acknowledged his role in the man’s death. So the suggestion that the court was too decadent to value human life is unfair.

Depardieu’s Vatel seems a very different man from the real one. Whereas the real Vatel was stressed out, deeply concerned with his honor and reputation, and probably suffering from sleep deprivation, the cinematic Vatel is not concerned with honor and reputation so much as being a decent man. When the king summons him to compliment him, Vatel refuses because he is too busy. He wants the festival to go right, not because it’s a matter of honor, but because he’s committed to doing what he’s said he will do and because he wants Condé to do well. He’s not high-strung; he’s quite solid and serious, more so than the people around him. His suicide has little to do with the fish; that problem is simply the last straw, and he seems to have decided to kill himself already.

So the film’s treatment of the court of Louis XIV is somewhat negative and acts mainly to establish the protagonist’s virtue. But the film is worth a look for its depiction of a facet of court life that is too rarely shown, the hidden underside of the cooks, the purveyors, the servants, and the other little people. Unlike recent productions like Downton Abbey, the film isn’t interested in most of them as people, but more in the work they are doing to feed and entertain the court. This nameless army are as much the heroes of the film as Vatel.

Want to Know More?

Vatel is available on Amazon.

I doubt there’s much written on Vatel himself, but if you want to know about Louis XIV,  there are a lot of biographies, such as Richard Wilkinson’s Louis XIV (Routledge Historical Biographies). This is a little off-topic, but one of my favorite books about Loui’s court, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (Magic in History)deals with the occult demimonde of 17th century Paris; it goes into considerable detail about the complex social and sexual hierarchies at court.

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise: Framing the Story

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain

In my previous comments on 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992, dir. Ridley Scott), I examined the way the film substantially misrepresents the life of Columbus in a variety of ways, particularly by trying to make it fit with American high school textbook accounts of Columbus and by trying to shift the blame for his misdeeds after he arrived in the Caribbean. But that analysis focuses on the film as a presentation of history.

The film actually wears a thin fig-leaf of protection against charges of historical inaccuracy. It has an undeveloped frame tale that presents the film as actually being based on a biography of Columbus written by his illegitimate son Fernando. It opens with a brief voice-over narrative of Fernando (Loren Dean), who recalls his father saying “Nothing that results from human progress is achieved by unanimous consent. And those who are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of others.” (Needless to say, this is a fake quote from Columbus, not something he actually said. the concept of ‘human progress’ didn’t exist in the 15th century.)

The adult Fernando falls silent as the film shows Christopher (Gerard Depardieu) and Fernando sitting by the sea watching a ship sail out of sight. Periodically, Fernando figures in the story, though not in a very important way.

The film ends after Columbus’ third voyage. An older, unwell Christopher is seated in a chair looking out to sea. Fernando asks his father to tell him what he remembers and takes up a quill in preparation to take dictation. Christopher says “I remember…” and the film essentially ends as Fernando waits for him to continue.

Fernando

By book-ending the film with these two moments of recollection, the film essentially tells us that it is not showing us history the way it actually happened, but rather history as Christopher and Fernando chose to present it.

Fernando did in fact write a biography of his father. Its rather long title gets shorted in English to The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son Fernando. It was written more than 3 decades after his father’s death, and thus isn’t his father’s memoires in any real sense, but Fernando did have all his father’s papers and journals, and so had a great deal of material to work with in composing his father’s stories.

Fernando was writing with a purpose. He explicitly says that he is seeking to counter the negative stories that have circulated about his father. He objects to the claim that his father was of humble origins, and instead hints that he was descended from royalty. He seeks to refute the claim that other Spaniards had found the Caribbean before Columbus, and says, probably incorrectly, that his father attended a university as a young man. Overall, he wanted to present his father as a great man who had accomplished remarkable things, and he was supporting his brother Diego, who was embroiled in a lawsuit to recover some of their father’s property and legal rights.

As a result, the film consistently presents Columbus as a man who recognizes that he is doing something remarkable. He knows that he is an important historical figure. The quote at the start of the film is complete fabrication, but it is typical of Depardieu’s Columbus and his sense that he knows better than those around him, a sense that the film consistently reinforces, even when it’s wrong.

During his debate at the university of Salamanca, Christopher suggests that he considers himself a ‘chosen one’. Later, after he is recalled to Spain, he tells Sanchez, a resentful noble, that he has accomplished something that Sanchez, for all his nobility, could not do. At the end of the film, one of the university faculty members comments that Columbus has wasted his life, but Sanchez retorts that if either of them are remembered at all, it will be because of Columbus. So by the end of the film, Columbus’ sense of himself as a historically important figure is beginning to be recognized by those around him, most importantly his son Fernando.

If the film is meant to be Fernando’s biography of his father rather than an objective reporting of what happened, the film’s lapses into inaccuracy are less problematic, because they can be seen as Fernando eulogizing his father and trying to craft an image of him as a man who mattered.

However, the film’s frame-tale doesn’t really work. It’s too slight and undeveloped. The voice-over narrative that opens the film is never repeated, so the audience essentially forgets it and is only reminded right at the end of the film. Furthermore, the film can’t really be from Fernando’s point of view. At one point, Columbus himself briefly narrates the film, and on various occasions the film shows things that happen when Columbus is not present and could not possibly know about. Instead, it’s just a clumsy narrative technique that wasn’t well-thought-out.

Want to Know More?

1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

If you want to read Fernando’s biography of his father, you can find it on Amazon as The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus: by his Son Ferdinand.

1492: The Conquest of Paradise: Trouble In Paradise

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Adrian de Moxica, Bartolome de las Casas, Christopher Columbus, Francisco Bobadilla, Francisco Roldan, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Michael Winscott, Ridley Scott

As I mentioned in my last post, the traditional Columbus narrative that most Americans learn focuses almost entirely on his first voyage to the New World and the supposed obstacles leading up to that voyage. But 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (1992, dir. Ridley Scott) covers that material in only about 40 minutes or so. The remaining two thirds of the film are devoted to what came after Columbus arrived on the Bahamian island (probably) now known as San Salvador. The fact that Scott devoted a majority of the film to what came after the discovery of the New World is definitely to his credit; this is a portion of Columbus’ story that is largely unknown to the average American. Unfortunately, what is less to Scott’s credit is the systematic effort the film makes to exonerate Columbus from some of the things he did after he discovered San Salvador.

(And to be clear, Columbus discovered the “New World” the same way hipsters discover new bands. It’s new to them, but that doesn’t mean that no one else knew about it before them. They just want to pretend that.)

In an unintentionally accurate metaphor, Columbus is apparently going to stab the surf.

The film depicts Columbus (Gerard Depardieu) as experiencing a deep sense of wonder about the lush jungle environment of San Salvador. In a voice-over narration by Columbus, he says that he has found a new Eden, a theme the film reinforces with shots of snakes (one of whom kills a crew member, in a foreshadowing that this Eden is not all smiles and fluffy bunnies). Throughout the rest of the film, Columbus is shown as idealistically longing for this promised land, envisioning Spaniards and native peoples living together harmoniously. He wants to convert them to Christianity, but he wants to achieve this peacefully.

They discover the native Arawak people and build a tentative relationship with them. Columbus expresses interest in the gold artifacts they possess, and the Arawak chieftain gives him some. Parts of the film are here drawing directly off of Columbus’ journal, but what the film leaves out here is that Columbus took a number of Arawaks captive and tried to force them to show him where the gold came from. He leaves 39 men behind to build a fort and then returns to Spain with gold, parrots, and native men (which the film again conveniently forgets to explain were his prisoners). The film also falsely represents him as introducing tobacco to the Spanish court.

The Second Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The film then collapses Columbus’ second and third voyage into one long sequence. He prepares a second expedition, but it is clear that his rise to prominence is resented by the Spanish nobility, who emerge as the bad guys of the second half of the film, especially Adrian de Moxica (Michael Winscott), a surly trouble-making noble whose hair and make-up are styled to make him look creepy. Over the course of the film Moxica emerges as the real snake in Eden. He repeatedly wants to kill natives and has to be talked down by Columbus, who just wants peace. It is implied that he helps one of his men rape a native woman. He resents Columbus’ demands that he engage in physical labor. When the natives begin bringing gold dust to the settlement, he chops the hand off a man who hasn’t found any. Columbus arrests him for this, but then a local tribe stages an ambush and Columbus has to take men to suppress it. While he is gone, Moxica is released from prison, burns Columbus’ house and leads a rebellion. When Columbus finally defeats and corners him, Moxica jumps off a cliff rather than surrender.

With a face like that, you know Moxica eats babies for breakfast

The minor problem in this narrative is that Moxica was not the leader of the rebellion; he was only a participant in Francisco Roldán’s rebellion. He was captured and hanged, while Roldán successfully negotiated with Columbus for peace. It’s possible to reconcile much of the film’s version of events with the actual events, but Moxica’s role in the whole matter is exaggerated.

The bigger problem is that Scott is leaving out the fact that Columbus himself was guilty of most of the things the film shows Moxica doing. When Columbus arrived back on San Salvador, he discovered the Taino people had destroyed the fort and killed the men who had stayed behind. In retaliation, Columbus forced the Taino to provide gold dust on a regular basis and cut the hands off those who failed to deliver the tribute. He began enslaving native peoples and may have participated in the rape of at least one of them. He resisted the conversion of the native peoples because it was illegal under Spanish law to enslave Christians. In other words, Columbus showed comparatively little interest in peacefully co-existing with the natives and instead violently exploited and enslaved them.

The subtitle “The Conquest of Paradise” is clearly meant to convey Ridley Scott’s sense that the Spanish mistreated the Carib peoples. The opening credits play over wood-block scenes of Spaniards massacring natives. Depardieu’s Columbus wants to treat them well, while the Spaniards around him want to abuse and exploit them. It’s laudable that Scott wanted to present this side of the story to an American population that is still today largely unaware of these issues, but his insistence on treating Columbus as the hero of the story prevents him from admitting that Columbus was in fact the driving force behind much of this ‘Conquest of Paradise’. So once again, the film’s insistence on a heroic Columbus turns the facts upside down. The hero is shown opposing the evils he himself enacted.

Columbus making some new friends

Nor does the film want to admit that Columbus and his brothers were largely incompetent governors. The film depicts Moxica rebelling because Columbus is preventing him from abusing the natives, because he resents a commoner having authority over him, and because he is unhappy that he is being forced to labor like a commoner. One colonist accuses him of treating the natives better than the Spaniards. So Columbus’ problem is that he’s too good to the natives. Here the typical American film’s prejudice against aristocrats comes through. Moxica is a noble and therefore a bad guy, while Columbus is a commoner and therefore a good guy. Never mind the fact that Columbus had been ennobled by the Spanish government; Columbus remembers his roots.

The film shows natives being sent to Spain as slaves, as a punishment for their rebellion, but never explains who took the decision to impose this punishment, even though it obviously has to be Columbus, since he’s the guy in charge. Then a (fictitious) hurricane strikes San Salvador, badly damaging everything. This provides the opening his opponents need, and they orchestrate his recall to Spain and the loss of his office and much of his property, with the film suggesting that he was left quite poor.

In reality, Columbus made numerous mistakes as governor. He sent Isabella 500 slaves, which angered her, because she objected to the enslavement of Spanish subjects, so she sent them back with a stern rebuke. The colony struggled not because of a hurricane but because of Columbus’ poor decisions. What drove Roldán’s rebellion was apparently a sense that Columbus and his brothers were mismanaging the colony, because the Spaniards wanted the right to exploit the natives for their own profit instead of just for Columbus’ profit. Ultimately, Columbus capitulated and signed a deal with Roldán that established the encomienda system that permitted the virtual enslavement of natives.

Columbus recognized that he was losing control of the situation and asked the Spanish Crown for assistance. Instead, Isabella sent Francisco de Bobadilla to conduct an investigation. Ultimately Bobadilla removed Columbus from office, sent him back to Spain as a prisoner, and assumed the governorship for two years until he was replaced.

In 2006, a scholar in Spain discovered Bobadilla’s report about the accusations against Columbus. The report, which names 23 witnesses, including both supporters and opponents of Columbus, describes him as a tyrant who sought to maintain his authority through violence and intimidation. It claims that Columbus regularly employed torture, mutilation, and slavery as punishment to keep control of the colony. He punished a native rebellion by dismembering the rebels and parading their body parts around. We must be cautious about simply trusting Bobadilla’s report; since he took over Columbus’ office, we can see a motive for exaggerating Columbus’ misdeeds.

But other sources confirm the general picture of the report. One Spanish priest, Bartolemé de las Casas, claimed that between 3 and 4 million native people died under Columbus’ rule. This may well be an exaggeration; an incomplete census taken by Columbus’ brother found 1.13 million people on Hispaniola, but if even a tenth of de las Casas’ figure is accurate, it’s still pretty horrible. By 1540, the Taino people had become extinct; in 1514, the native population of Hispaniola had been reduced to around 22,000. In 1542, de las Casas’ report about the Spanish treatment of the natives shocked Charles V into abolishing the encomienda system, although the system that replaced it wasn’t much better.

However, in fairness to Columbus, not all of the death toll was intentional; the natives were particularly vulnerable to Old World diseases that had inadvertently been brought along. Claims that Columbus presided over a virtual holocaust of natives are a conflation of his actual misdeeds with a death toll from disease that Columbus could not have anticipated or prevented.

Bobadilla’s report wasn’t rediscovered until more than a decade after 1492 was released, so Scott couldn’t have included these specific charges, but much of Columbus’ brutality against the natives and the charges of mismanagement were well known to scholars when he made the film. So while Scott wants to be honest with the audience about how poorly the Spanish treated the native peoples, he is also engaging in misdirection, trying to shift the blame for Columbus’ actions onto Moxica. He’s trying to eat his cake and have it too, and the result is a film that obscures the past as much as it reveals it.

A Few Other Things

Two other elements of the high school textbook narrative need to be briefly addressed. The first is that Columbus never realized what he had found. In the film, when he is removed from office (which happened in 1500), Bobadilla tells him that Amerigo Vespucci has discovered the mainland just beyond the Caribbean Islands. There is some uncertainty about how many voyages Vespucci made (at least one, and possibly two fabricated letters supposedly by Vespucci have muddied the waters), but he definitely sailed along the Brazilian coastline in 1501 and may have made a voyage in 1499. So the film suggests that it was Vespucci who finally located South America.

Amerigo Vespucci

However, in 1498, at least one year before Vespucci, Columbus found the mouth of the Orinoco river and correctly recognized that he had to have found a continent and not just another island. In 1502, during his fourth and last voyage, he found Honduras and Panama, and was told by the natives of another ocean. Thus he probably figured out that he had not found China or India, although we cannot be certain.

Also, the film implies that Columbus died poor. When he returns to Seville after being released from a Spanish prison, he is reunited with his mistress Beatriz (whom the film allows us to think is actually his wife) and she tells him that “they” took everything from their house. It’s true that the Spanish Crown stripped him of most of his titles and refused to pay him the 10% of all profits from the colonies as they had earlier agreed to do, but he was not left penniless. He died in relative comfort and his son was eventually able to reclaim some of the rights that had been granted to him. His descendants today still hold his title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea”, as an epilogue text to 1492 tells us.

Want To Know More?

1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.

Columbus’ writings are available from Penguin as The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Classics)

Marvin Lunenfeld’s 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretations (Sources in Modern History Series)would be a good place to start learning about the impact of Columbus on the ‘new world’ he found. Another good book is William D. and Carla Rahn Philip’s The Worlds of Christopher Columbus.

1492: The Conquest of Paradise: (Not) Your High School Columbus

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1492: The Conquest of Paradise, Christopher Columbus, Flat Earth, Gerard Depardieu, Latin America, Medieval Europe, Medieval Spain, Ridley Scott, The Caribbean

In 1992, there was obvious interest in the anniversary of Columbus’ famous voyage of discovery, so not one but two films were released to cash in on public interest. Ilya Salkind’s Chrisopher Columbus: The Discovery faired quite poorly at the box office and was viewed as something of a fiasco. 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (dir. Ridley Scott) didn’t do very well at the box office either; apparently there was less interest than people thought (Americans not interested in history? What a shock!). But Scott’s film got somewhat better reviews, and it’s probably a little bit more remembered nowadays, so I’m going to tackle this one first. I’ll probably get around to the other film at some later date.

The Basic Problem with Columbus

The essential problem with telling Columbus’ story is that Americans tend to have a very strong idea of what it looks like, largely derived from high school history textbooks. And much of what these textbooks have to say about Columbus is crap.

In his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen examined the most widely-used high school American history textbooks and studied both what percentage of their material was factually correct and how this material was presented to students. His conclusion is that a very high percentage of the material is either provably false or simply made-up speculation. In his chapter on Columbus, he offers a composite paragraph representing what these textbooks generally have to say, which I reproduce here; boldface portions are what scholars can actually say with reasonable certainty.

“Born in Genoa of humble parents, Christopher Columbus grew up to be an experienced seafarer, venturing as far as Iceland and West Africa. His adventures convinced him that the world must be round, and that sailing west could have the fabled riches of the East—spices and gold—, superseding the overland routes, which the Turks had closed off to commerce. To get funding for his enterprise, he beseeched monarch after monarch in Western Europe. After first being dismissed Isabella of Spain, Columbus finally got his chance when Isabella decided to underwrite a modest expedition. Columbus outfitted three pitifully small ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria and set forth from Spain. After an arduous journey of more than two months, during which his mutinous crew nearly threw him overboard, Columbus discovered the West Indies on October 12, 1492. Unfortunately, although he made three more voyages to America, he never knew he had discovered a new world. Columbus died in obscurity, unappreciated and penniless. Yet without his daring, American history would have been very different, because in a sense he made it all possible.” (Loewen, p.54)

As you can see, more of the paragraph is speculation or falsehood than is fact. From your own education, you might remember details such as that the voyage involved heavy storms, that Columbus altered the logs of his journey, or that the crew was on the brink of mutiny when land was sighted. These are common details included in some high school textbooks, but they’re made up. The fact is that we don’t actually know much about the journey itself.

Most famously, you probably heard the story that everyone in Columbus’ day thought the world was flat and that it was possible to sail off the edge of the world. According to the story, Columbus was the first person to realize that the world was round. That’s crap too, made up by Washington Irving for his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a three-volume historical novel published in 1828. Irving was consciously trying to create a patriotic American mythology, and he succeeded well enough to embed this myth of the flat earth in American minds still to this day. Mercifully, as Loewen points out, the textbooks have mostly abandoned this particular bit of nonsense.

The fact is that educated people and sailors have understood that the Earth is round since at least the 4^th century BC or so. There are many ways to recognize the sphericity of the planet, including the curved shadow it casts on the moon during a lunar eclipse, the fact that where you are influences which constellations you can see, and the fact that when ships sail away from land, they gradually disappear from view hull-first. The reason that Europeans generally didn’t try sailing westward was that they understood that the circumference of the Earth is more than 22,000 miles. Since they didn’t know about the existence of the Americas, they assumed that the distance from Europe westward to Asia was too great to sail, because it would be impossible to take along enough fresh water for the entire journey. What is important about Columbus here is not that he figured out that the Earth was round, but that he miscalculated the circumference as being much less than it was, and he also thought that Japan was further to the east of China than it is. As a result, he estimated that the journey involved about 3,000 miles, rather than the nearly 20,000 miles it actually involves. So instead of being a brilliant geographer, he was actually quite a bad one.

The First Voyage of Gerard Depardieu

The first third of 1492: The Conquest of Paradise focuses, unsurprisingly, on the lead up to the first voyage of Christopher Columbus (Gerard Depardieu). The film does a delicate dance between the facts and the traditional narrative that Americans have been spoon-fed. It wants to include the stuff you learned in high school, but it doesn’t want to be blatant about it. Right at the start of the film, in 1491, we see Columbus teaching his young son Fernando. He shows Fernando how ships disappear out of view hull-first, and he illustrates the sphericity of the Earth using an orange. So the film implies the flat-earth story without actually asserting it. Young Fernando might plausibly think the Earth is flat, so Columbus teaching him the truth is technically accurate without the film having to claim that everyone thought the world was flat.

Soon he is informed that a friendly monk has arranged for him to have a meeting with the faculty of the University of Salamanca to present his radical theories (in reality, the meeting happened 6 years earlier, because Queen Isabella had already agreed to patronize him). The film shows the faculty understanding that the world is round; they cite Aristotle and Ptolemy’s calculations that the world was too large to allow sailing westward to Asia (actually the calculations are those of Eratosthenes of Cyrene, but at least they’re in the ball-park). In reply, Columbus cites Pierre D’ailly and a few other medieval authorities and argues that the world is smaller than the ancient calculations. So the film gives a reasonably accurate depiction of what the issues are, although it doesn’t explain that Columbus’ figures are woefully wrong. He’s the hero, and he did actually get to the Americas, so explaining that he was wrong and got lucky is sort of embarrassing. But the refusal to acknowledge this seriously distorts at least two scenes in the film, including this one.

Because the film can’t admit that Columbus was mistaken, the uninformed viewer is likely to take away from the scene that the faculty were wrong when in fact they are basically correct. The scholars are depicted as arrogantly mocking Columbus and refusing to consider new ideas. But since Columbus is the hero and must be right, even though his arguments are actually wrong, the scholars opposing him must be wrong and therefore bad, even though they’re actually right. And this, unfortunately, is the basic tone this part of the film takes. Everything Columbus does is good, even though in fact he’s wrong. It makes analyzing the film a little maddening because black is white and down is up.

Even Depardieu can’t figure out what the film is trying to say

Not long after he is turned down, Columbus is approached by Martín Pinzón, a shipmaster who offers to support him. In reality, it was Columbus who approached Pinzón and had to win his support. Pinzón was a skilled mariner who, according to some French stories, had already discovered the Americas four years earlier. He and his two brothers captained the Pinta and the Niña, vessels they owned, and they provided a very substantial sum of money to fund the voyage. They also recognized that the ships and crew that Columbus has arranged for were inadequate and entirely dismissed them. So these three brothers deserve a great deal of the credit for the success of the voyage. But in the film, Martin Pinzón is depicted essentially as a follower (in the words of Carla Rahn Phillips and William D. Phillips, Jr, as a “supportive sidekick”), and his brothers don’t really feature at all.

Just before the voyage, Columbus confesses to his priest that he’s been lying to everyone. He doesn’t actually know how long the journey is. All he knows is that he’s right. The priest angrily tells him that he must tell all the sailors, and when Columbus refuses he threatens to tell the men himself, until Columbus reminds him that he cannot speak about matters he hears in confession. Columbus demands absolution, and the priest gives it to him.

This scene is incredibly problematic. Its obvious purpose is to ratchet up the drama; Columbus is having a crisis of confidence that he needs to work through, and the revelation of his uncertainty raises the stakes for the journey itself. But it’s pointless and made-up drama; the audience knows he’s going to make it. So really all it does it cast Columbus in the mold of the Heroic Individual. He can’t prove he’s right; he just knows he is. What matters is not anything as unimportant as science; what matters is that he’s certain he’s right (except that he’s not actually certain). And he’s not actually right, because he’s completely miscalculated the distance. What saves him is the fortunate existence of the Bahamas, not his certainty that he can get to Asia. So he’s totally wrong, but thinks he’s right even though he doesn’t know he’s right, but his certainty carries him through and he’s rewarded for being certain but wrong! My head hurts just trying to understand what this scene is actually saying. But I guess we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

And then there’s the wrongness of the theology in this scene. The priest forgives him even though Columbus is still actively committing a sin and risking the lives of all the sailors in the bargain. In Catholic theology, confession only merits absolution if the sinner is penitent and sincerely intends to amend his sin, but Columbus is demanding forgiveness for a sin he’s still actively committing and refusing to give up. But, if it’s one thing I’ve learned in writing this blog, it’s that the medieval clergy just make everything up as they go along, so Columbus gets his absolution basically for being pushy.

The journey itself manages to avoid most of the textbook clichés about the journey. There’s no storms, there’s a little lesson on how a quadrant is used in navigation, and there’s some nice details about life on board a ship. Pinzón gets anxious and Columbus has to point out that there’s not enough water left to turn around and get home. Then he has to persuade a nervous crew that they need to have faith in God and themselves, and that if they succeed, future generations will talk about how brave they all were. That does the trick, despite not being a very good speech. Then Columbus gets bitten by an insect and realizes they must be near land because I guess they don’t have bugs out at sea.

The actual landfall is nicely done. Instead of someone shouting “land!” as your high school textbook probably had it, the ship drifts through a fog bank and then a lush jungle emerges out of the mists in a really beautiful peace of photography that briefly manages to capture what must have been a genuine sense of wonder about the new land they’ve just arrived at. In some ways, it’s the best moment in the whole film.

What’s nice about this film is, unlike your high school textbook’s story about Columbus, the film’s story is only about a third over. The film is actually far more interested in what happened after Columbus arrived than what it took to get there. But that’s for another post.

Want To Know More?

Read James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong Reprint Edition by Loewen, James W. published by Touchstone (2007) Paperback. No, seriously. Read it. It’s a necessary corrective to a lot of the nonsense in American history textbooks, especially since the Texas Board of Education started getting the final say in what goes into high school textbooks. If I were ever going to teach an American history class, I think I’d use this as my textbook. If you teach high school history, you pretty much have to read this. You might also look at Loewen’s Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series).

If you want a biography of Columbus, one of the better ones is Kirkpatrick Sale’s Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise: Second Edition (Tauris Parke Paperbacks).But Sale isn’t a historian, and is not always as objective as he ought to be. So read with caution.

Oh, yeah. 1492: Conquest of Paradiseis available on Amazon.