Скачать или смотреть column [78] The Kellogg–Briand Pact

📚 From Paris with Peace — and Beautiful Illusions

Paris, 1928. The Arc de Triomphe gleams, the Orient Express whistles east, and sixty-three nations sign away the right to war. A treaty for eternal peace—or just a beautiful hallucination? Eleven years later, tanks roll into Poland.

Was it naïve? Yes. Was it beautiful? Absolutely. The “Roaring Twenties” glow—until the light flickers, and idealism collapses into ideology.

This is the story of the moment when art, reason, and history all tried to heal the same wound—and failed beautifully.

👉 Sometimes paradise lasts only ten days—or one afternoon in Paris—and still manages to haunt a century.

   • Orient Express: Philip Sparke  


🏛️ Famous Phrases & Their Sources

・ “Les Fleurs du mal” (Charles Baudelaire, 1857) — The Bible of ennui and urban beauty. Parisian modern ennui
💬 Paris invented melancholy before coffee shops did.

・ “In Search of Lost Time / Time Regained. 1913” — Marcel Proust’s seven-volume epic exploring memory, time, and identity.
💬 Proof that nostalgia can outlast eternity — if you write fast enough.

・ “Madeleine” (from In Search of Lost Time) — A bite of memory that opens eternity.
💬 The past, steeped in tea and regret.

・ “The Crisis of the Mind” (Paul Valéry, 1919) — Essay mourning Europe’s spiritual collapse after WWI.
💬 The dawn after reason’s hangover.

・ “April is the cruellest month” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922) — Modernism’s most exhausted sigh.
💬 Hope blooms — and that’s the tragedy.

・ “Manifesto of Surrealism” (André Breton, 1924) — An artistic revolution merging dream and reality.
💬 The only rebellion that tried to weaponize dreams.

・ “Kellogg–Briand Pact” (1928) — The international treaty that “outlawed war” as a national policy.
💬 Idealism with a fountain pen — proof that signatures can’t stop bullets.

・ “Nadja” (André Breton, 1928) — Surrealist novel about love, madness, and reality’s fragile edge.
💬 Ten days of magic — then the asylum calls.

・ “Who am I? / Qui suis-je?” — The haunting question opening Nadja, the surrealist blend of love, madness, and Paris.
💬 Every revolution starts with someone asking the wrong question beautifully.

・ “La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas.” (“Beauty will be convulsive or not at all.”) — Nadja — Surrealist idea that true beauty is violent, uncontrollable, alive.
💬 If it doesn’t shake you, it isn’t real.

・ “You are all a lost generation.” — Gertrude Stein’s remark to Ernest Hemingway, capturing the post–WWI generation’s spiritual drift.
💬 The twenties roared because everyone was trying not to hear the silence.

・ “All Quiet on the Western Front” (Erich Maria Remarque, 1929) — The novel that made war feel human—and hopeless.
💬 The silence after the guns is the loudest sound in history.

・ “The Red Decade” (1930s) — The brief affair between Western intellectuals and communism.
💬 When Reason joined the revolution — and lost its mind.

・ “The Red Decade.” — Term for the 1930s when Western intellectuals romanticized communism as reason’s last utopia.
💬 When even logic wore a red scarf and called it faith.

・ “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” (1939) — The Soviet–Nazi nonaggression pact that shattered illusions.
💬 Nothing says “utopia’s over” like a handshake with your enemy.

・ “Thirty Years’ War of the 20th Century” (1914–1945) — The historian’s view that both world wars were one conflict.
💬 Humanity hit “pause” between two nightmares — and called it peace.

・ “惡の華 (Aku no Hana)” (2009) — The Japanese rendering of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857); later reimagined in manga, anime, and film.
💬 From decadence to delinquency — every era blooms its own evil flowers.

・ “Reason” — The Enlightenment’s gift and curse; divine logic turned self-righteous.
💬 When God retired, Reason took His desk.


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