Timeline for Why were French maids apparently so common outside France?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 17, 2022 at 21:44 | answer | added | Cody Benedict | timeline score: 0 | |
| Jan 16, 2022 at 19:41 | comment | added | WS2 | My first (British) passport (1960) had everything in both English and French. I cannot say for sure when French first took over from Latin as the principal language of western Christendom - but it certainly did. | |
| Jan 16, 2022 at 19:37 | comment | added | WS2 | Bear in mind that until the late-19th century French was spoken in the principal houses of Europe - by Russian tsarist familes, Habsburgs in Vienna etc (Marie Antoinette not only had a French name but it was her first language, before she married Louis XVI) It was also the language of diplomacy. I think the first international assembly at which English was given priority was the Berlin conference of 1884/5 which settled a lot of African issues. So a knowledge of French on the part of the rising bourgeoisie was considered important - perhaps a good reason among others to employ a French maid. | |
| Jan 16, 2022 at 17:13 | answer | added | ed.hank | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 22:26 | comment | added | Robert Columbia♦ | The Wikipedia article doesn't really say that French maids we "so common" outside of France. At most, it says that they existed to some extent and ended up a theatrical stereotype. If the development of the stereotype was driven mostly by theatrical productions, then that means that the actual maids need not have been very common at all in real life. Could you find and edit in a clearer source? | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 22:24 | history | notice added | Robert Columbia♦ | Needs citation | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 19:07 | comment | added | MCW♦ | 1 Why, and 2) Question is based on a false or unproven assumption. Please revise; it should be possible to transform this into a good question. | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 18:32 | answer | added | totalMongot | timeline score: -1 | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 18:29 | comment | added | Jean Marie Becker | As Steve Bird said, this "phenemona" has never been "so common". There were a certain number of French maids in Russia before WWI in wealthy families in order that the youth could be familiarized the early possible with french language which was very "fashionable"there at that time. A certain number of examples can be found in Russian litterature; for example in Tolstoi's Anna Karenina "Oblonsky's house was upside down. The Princess, once having discovered that her husband had an affair with a frenchwoman [home] teacher that was just fired..." | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 17:30 | history | edited | MCW♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 11 characters in body
|
| Jan 15, 2022 at 16:29 | comment | added | Spencer | Wouldn't this have been a British-only thing? | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 14:24 | comment | added | Steve Bird | Were they "so common"? My impression is that they were employed only in households large enough (and rich enough) to have a separate servant for the lady of the house. This kind of set up was pretty much out of date by the second world war so it's very unlikely that it went on for the "entire 20th century". | |
| S Jan 15, 2022 at 14:16 | review | First questions | |||
| Jan 15, 2022 at 14:24 | |||||
| S Jan 15, 2022 at 14:16 | history | asked | Yengkong C | CC BY-SA 4.0 |