Bayonne: a violent backdrop

Barthes, through the caption of a photograph, describes his birthplace of Bayonne as the “perfect city,” yet dismisses this claim as being fictive (Barthes, 6). What Barthes describes as the province-as-spectacle (Barthes, 6), Bayonne, from a historical perspective, has been wrought with violence. The cathedral of Bayonne, a faithful rendition of Gothic architecture, has been destroyed by fire on two separate occasions, in 1258 and 1310. Moreover, Bayonne is the historical home of the bayonet, being forged in a city renowned for its cutlery manufacture since the fourteenth century (Blackmore, 66).

Bourgeois Life/Structuralized Violence

The violence associated with ordering is further rationalized in Barthes’ recounting of the three gardens and the family home. The gardens, growing exponentially away from the rigidness of bourgeois life and into wilderness (Barthes, 12), from utopia to atopia, into the undefined miasma of “civilization.”