Murray N. Rothbard’s “French Masterpiece!” is a short film review and cultural essay focused on Alain Corneau’s Tous Les Matins du Monde. Rothbard uses the review to make a broader claim about artistic seriousness, musical culture, and the survival of “Old Culture” against modern trivialization. The piece is structured as a comic reversal: he begins by advertising his usual hostility to slow, dark, foreign-language art films, then turns that expected rejection into evidence of the film’s extraordinary achievement.
Instead, to the stunned surprise of myself and my wife, I found a genuine masterpiece, one of the best and most notable pictures in years.
The main thesis is that Corneau’s film succeeds not despite its austerity but because that austerity lets seventeenth-century French Baroque music become the governing dramatic language. Rothbard treats music not as decoration or score but as a substitute for ordinary cinematic exposition. The small amount of dialogue is not a defect, because the film’s real speech is the viola da gamba and the lost compositions associated with Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais.
It’s true that there is little dialogue, but essentially substituting for it is truly glorious seventeenth-century French Baroque music, featuring the Baroque viola da gamba, essentially the Baroque ancestor to the modern cello.
From this premise Rothbard reads the plot as a drama of artistic vocation. Sainte-Colombe is not merely a bereaved recluse, but the emblem of purity: a master who rejects Louis XIV’s court because court culture turns music into display. Marais, by contrast, embodies brilliant talent compromised by ambition. His youthful desire for instruction, his betrayal of Sainte-Colombe’s daughter, his career success, and his late return form a moral arc: fame without fidelity to the “soul of music” leaves him spiritually impoverished.
It is also a romantic, moving, and perceptive film about the truths and tensions of master–disciple relationship, which carries insights beyond music into scholarship, science, and indeed every walk of life.
This expansion beyond music is central to the essay’s relevance. Rothbard turns a period film into a miniature theory of cultural transmission: genuine mastery is preserved in personal lineage, discipline, and reverence for form, not in public prestige or institutional favor. His praise of Jean-Pierre Marielle as Sainte-Colombe reinforces this hierarchy of value; the “noble maitre” is the true center of the film, while celebrity acting remains secondary.
Rothbard also gives the essay a polemical edge by linking the film’s reception to hope for cultural taste. The soundtrack’s commercial success matters to him because it suggests that serious Baroque music can still defeat the mass-market pop culture he invokes through Michael Jackson and Madonna.
Hey, maybe there’s hope for our culture yet!
The final section answers an anticipated scholarly objection: historians complain that the film invents what is largely unknown about Sainte-Colombe. Rothbard’s answer is to defend fiction as a legitimate vehicle of truth. The point of the film is not documentary reconstruction but romantic and aesthetic tribute.
But who cares? What’s wrong with fiction?
That question leads to the essay’s most explicit cultural judgment. Rothbard values the film’s visual resemblance to old painting and especially its recreated quiet: an acoustic world not yet invaded by modern noise. The review’s final conceptual move is to make Baroque art an index of civilizational height.
As it is, the film is a wonderful, romantic tribute to musicians as well as to music, and to the best of the Old Culture.
The work proceeds from personal prejudice to aesthetic conversion, from synopsis to moral interpretation, from awards to cultural diagnosis, and from historical objection to an affirmative theory of artistic fiction. Its core argument is that Tous Les Matins du Monde is a masterpiece because it makes music itself the bearer of drama and because it dramatizes the conflict between artistic purity and worldly success.
See the movie, then buy the soundtrack, for the Baroque, in music, art, architecture, was the pinnacle that human civilization has yet reached.
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