Last night, I waited impatiently for the boyfriend to stop commenting on his Napoleonic battle reenactment group’s online forum, and come sit down at the dinner table. As time dragged on and my stomach’s growls got louder and louder – but not loud enough to match Ali’s impatient meows (it was meatball night), I managed to find a way to keep my hunger at bay. Okay, I also snuck a meatball or two, as well, but I still think this is the real reason I was able to endure the long wait….
The boyfriend’s reenactment group is one of the most hardcore out there. They don’t even cheat when no one is watching, like most groups do. For example, after a day of historically-accurate military maneuvers and practical tasks, they don’t just slip away to a hotel or tuck into a comfy modern sleeping bag; instead, these staunch realists spend the night in canvass tents or makeshift shelters, huddled together in piles of hay for warmth.
And yet, I thought, as I watched the boyfriend typing, they still use technology quite a lot. And suddenly the question came to me: Would Napoleon have used the internet? Not just for the occasional search, or maybe to order a book or something; would he have used social media? Would Napoleon have had a Facebook account, or been on Twitter?
When I asked the boyfriend, he gave a heavy sigh and said, “Stop bothering me. I’ll be there in a minute.” But I wasn’t trying to bother him – well, not entirely.
The question actually stuck in my mind. We all have historical figures we’re inspired, fascinated, and/or disgusted by. But how well do we really think we know them?
For example, I’ve read a lot of biographies of Vincent Van Gogh, and have seen many of his paintings in person. A well-worn copy of Letters to Theo sits on my bookshelf. But while we may know a lot about how he lived in his time, how would he deal with a major aspect of our own era? Namely, would Vincent have any kind of online presence? On the one hand, he wasn’t the kind of person to do what others typically did, and you’d think he’d be too involved in his artistic world to bother with something like Facebook – but, in addition to his friendships with other artists, there are those letters to his brother. In our day, would he have emailed them? Maybe not, because they often contained sketches and I feel like maybe he liked making those personal touches by hand; sending them as scanned attachments probably wouldn’t do. But I could see Vincent being on Tumblr or something like that.
Or what about Marie Antoinette? The easy answer is, “This is the woman who said ‘Let them eat cake’ – she’d be sharing more selfies online than Kim Kardashian!” But the doomed queen’s infamous phrase is actually a myth. And just as that part of the Marie Antoinette legend isn’t exactly what it seems, neither was her personality. Although she loved to spend money on clothes and enjoyed indulging in pastries and other comforts (Did you know she had an early version of the flush toilet installed in her private apartments in Versailles at a time when other nobles seemed not to care about just peeing and shitting in the palace hallways?), she also craved privacy, and was apparently an excellent and devoted mother. So maybe she would rather have lived in the real world – or in the village that was built for her on the grounds of Versailles where she would go with her closest friends and pretend to be a shepherdess to get away from it all – rather than spend time posting pictures on Instagram. But the “devoted mother” thing does make me wonder if she’d have a Facebook account to at least share pictures of her beloved children. And she did love fashion, and was a fashion icon of her time, which is making me re-think the Instagram thing. Maybe she would even have been like a late-eighteenth century Gwyneth Paltrow, with her own lifestyle blog? But public sentiment was really against her in France (hence her reputation for being merely frivolous, which continues today), so maybe she would have preferred not to put herself out there so much?
Oscar Wilde would probably have had a Twitter account. Could you imagine that? So many awesome aphorisms sent over the ether, right to your phone or tablet or computer screen.
And what about people like Charlotte Corday, who committed violent acts in the name of an ideal or in the belief that they would save others – would they sort of be like members of ISIS, who have Twitter accounts and such? Not that I think Charlotte Corday was anywhere near as evil as someone in the ranks of ISIS....
And of course, this isn’t just something you can think about with distant historic figures: what about someone like Marilyn Monroe, or Kurt Cobain?
The boyfriend still isn’t completely sure I wasn’t just asking him questions about Napoleon’s hypothetical social media presence so he’d come to the dinner table. But I’m really serious: this could be a great conversation-starter, especially if you’re in the company of people who like history. Or if you’ve run out of things to say at a book club meeting where you’re reading historic fiction or the classics or something.
Heck, you could even do this with fictional characters from the past or in settings where there is no internet. Would Madame Bovary have left troubling Facebook messages before her suicide? Jane Eyre, I think, would have eschewed social media, as would Mr. Rochester. Romeo and Juliet, though? I feel like they’d be posting couples selfies and over-the-top messages of love all the time. Maybe even one of those after-sex selfies?
Okay, so a quick Google search shows I'm not the only one who's ever wondered about all this. But it's still a great thing to ponder.
Although, no matter how interested a person might seem to be in musing over a historical figure or fictional character’s use of social media, there’s no guarantee the question will get them to pay attention and share their thoughts. The boyfriend, for example, just kept typing away, and finally Ali and I went ahead and got started on our dinner. And that was a good idea: he didn’t get to the table until about half hour after we’d bitten into our first (official) meatball. Still, the next time you’re with someone you think would be intrigued by the question, why not give it a shot?
